Reminiscences of a Student's Life

First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared Victorian education “ingeniously useless,” who blazed a trail for female scholars, and who changed the way we see the ancient world. Growing up in the Yorkshire countryside, Harrison showed an early aptitude for languages: by the age of seventeen, with the help of a governess, she had learned Greek, Latin, German, and some Hebrew. She went on to become the most influential Classicist of her generation. Drawing on the insights of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud, and on archaeological research, she helped to revolutionize the study of Greek myth. “The great Mother,” she wrote, “is prior to male divinities.” 

Unconventional in her private life, she spent her later years with the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, thirty-seven years her junior. Harrison’s zest for life is everywhere in these pages. Sprightly, amused, and amusing, her Reminiscences form an unforgettable sketch of a woman ahead of her time.

“Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about ancient Greek culture—peeling back that calm, white marble exterior to reveal something much more violent, messy and ecstatic underneath (‘bloody Jane’ they called her, for more reasons than one, I suspect). And she was the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer. She made it possible for me to do what I do.”

—Mary Beard, The Guardian

“[Her] intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense . . . and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated.”

—Virginia Woolf, New Statesman

“Harrison was a vivid and controversial intellectual presence both in this country and in England, particularly among writers (Yeats and D. H. Lawrence are among those who acknowledged her influence) . . . She wrote with a pathos and engagement rare among her academic peers, and her whole approach to the classics . . . seemed to open up new worlds of thought and feeling . . . One [has] to admire the passion and restless originality of her mind and the fructifying influence of her work on other writers.”

—Roger Kimball, New Criterion

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of a prosperous timber broker; her mother died soon after she was born. Educated at home as a child, Harrison enrolled in 1874 in the newly established Newnham College for women, at Cambridge University, where she later taught. In 1903 Harrison published her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, followed in 1912 by Themis, works that synthesized new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionize the study of ancient Greek civilization. A popular lecturer whose articles enjoyed a wide readership, Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and spent her last years in Paris with her “spiritual daughter,” the poet Hope Mirrlees. 

Daniel Mendelsohn’s books include The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic; Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays; and translations of the collected poems of Sappho and C. P. Cavafy. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey is forthcoming. 

Reminiscences of a Student's Life • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341999

Mar 12, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 27

5" x 8.5" • 104 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341982