This book traces both the personal and scholarly life of Jane Harrison (1850–1928), a scholar whose work on Greek art and the origins of religion broke new ground in English scholarship. After five years at Cambridge, where she was one of the first women students, she spent twenty years in London, lecturing on Greek art and travelling in Europe, studying archaeology in situ and in museums. During this time she lectured and published on Greek art and archaeology, her fluent command of languages equipping her to bring to the English public the latest Continental scholarship. Returning to Newnham ... More

This book traces both the personal and scholarly life of Jane Harrison (1850–1928), a scholar whose work on Greek art and the origins of religion broke new ground in English scholarship. After five years at Cambridge, where she was one of the first women students, she spent twenty years in London, lecturing on Greek art and travelling in Europe, studying archaeology in situ and in museums. During this time she lectured and published on Greek art and archaeology, her fluent command of languages equipping her to bring to the English public the latest Continental scholarship. Returning to Newnham College, Cambridge, at the age of fifty, she focussed her interest on Greek religion, breaking with tradition in preferring ‘primitive’ ritual over the classical Olympians and relying on intuition as much as reason. In collaboration with Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford, a group known as ‘the Cambridge Ritualists’, she applied to Classics the latest discoveries of anthropology and emerging theories from the social sciences. She published numerous articles and books, pre-eminently Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Her outspoken unorthodoxy and atheism earned her the reputation of being dangerous. It was her genius to set her research — essentially an investigation into the ‘real meaning’ of religion — within the wider context of human life, and her influence was felt far beyond the walls of academe.