Secret history
Someone was running across the gardens of "Fernham College" at a terrific pace. Her features were indistinct; the half-light made phantoms of everyone. But there was something familiar about her. "Could it be J- H- herself?"
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| Mary Beard |
Jane Harrison, who had died a few months before, would have enjoyed her cameo role in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a fleeting, unstoppable ghost. Born bang in the middle of the 19th century and passing into the Land of the Shades only in 1928, Harrison remains one of the most important and influential women in the field of classical studies.Almost a century after they were written, her books - Themis, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion - are still in print. She is famous for being among the first to dig through the sublime surfaces of Greek civilisation to expose the stranger and more primitive culture lurking underneath.
Prime ministers knew her, as did Eliots TS and George. André Gide wrote a poem, "Persephone", based on her ideas about the vegetation cycle, while Virginia Woolf was on hand to observe her "billing and cooing" with Hope Mirlees, the woman with whom she shared her later years and who became her devoted but reticent archivist.
As well as being clever and important she was also, of course, a Character, full of self-belief. Indeed, she was several Characters, depending on the audience and the mood - a professionally bluff Yorkshirewoman when it suited her, at other times the chain-smoking Sappho of Colville Gardens, whose intimate seminars were the subject of an admiring article in the Pall Mall Gazette.
Her lectures were full-scale theatrical events that she toured around the country. She dressed for the occasion, most famously in a shimmering beetle green, talking emphatically and always down to her audience, casting shadows over the hand-painted images of bearded serpents, sacrificial oxen and key words projected onto the screen behind her. There were sound effects, too. On one memorable occasion she had two friends whirl bull-roarers at the back of the hall to evoke the noises of a mystery cult. In Glasgow, 1,600 people came to hear her talk on Attic grave stelae, or so she told the reporter from the Gazette. To many she was a living monument, to others a brilliant self-publicist.
With her Sapphic love, her fondness for William Morris wallpaper, her languor and quotability, her deployment of teddy bears - in one letter, Harrison's toy bear invites Hope Mirlees, "his young wife", to dine in Hall with Harrison, his "elder wife", and signs off with a picture of the constellation Ursa Major - Harrison fits perfectly into the history of the Decadents and Effeminates, a history in which women rarely find a place. In some ways she is what Oscar Wilde, four years younger and the most brilliant male classicist of his year, might have been had he succeeded in his ambition to become an Oxford don.
Mary Beard has spent long hours in Jane Harrison's company, digging through the archives. She is interested less in Harrison's biography than in the way her students constructed her life and her archive. How to be honest and truthful about a woman they admired and loved without giving away her "Secret"? Harrison had herself published a book of reminiscences, but she destroyed much other material. Mirlees planned a personal biography shortly after Harrison's death, but found over several decades that it was an impossible task. It was Mirlees above all who made the archive, but the archive is designed to hide as much as it reveals. In Mary Beard, however, Jane Harrison has met her match.
The star of The Invention of Jane Harrison has to share the limelight with another character who is much more obscure. Ten years younger than Harrison, Eugenie Sellers, known to posterity as Mrs Arthur Strong, seemed at one time an equally good bet for posthumous glory. A great beauty in the 19th century who modelled for the pre-Raphaelites, in the 20th she became a pioneering historian of Roman art.
According to Asquith, she was the most "distinguished woman scholar" in the world: one of the first women to become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, recipient of the CBE and the gold medal of the city of Rome. She dominated the British School of Art and Archaeology for years, although not in title Director, but his Assistant.
When the director eventually married, troubles inevitably arose, ostensibly over fondness for animals. Was it true, as was alleged, that Mrs Strong had actually encouraged students to attend a bullfight? From such trivial beginnings a feud grew. When it seemed to be reaching a crisis, all three were summarily, if politely, dismissed.
Eugenie stayed on in Rome and increased her renown and her collection of calling cards. Her friends and acquaintances included Henry James, Ezra Pound, Mussolini and a whole clutch of cardinals. We know this because she saved the calling cards, as well as the correspondence over the bullfight dispute, annotating her letters. She left two rich archives, one in Cambridge and the other in Rome at the British School. Jane Harrison, on the other hand, burned her letters. Nevertheless it is Harrison and not Strong who is remembered.
Since they seem to have known almost everyone else worth knowing, Beard has a hunch that - despite the almost complete silence from their biographers - these two famous scholars must also have known each other. Mrs Strong, she notes, contributed to Harrison's memorial fund the carefully unobtrusive sum of one pound and five pence. Going much further back, she finds both as eager participants in a series of Greek tableaux put on in the spring of 1883 in the private theatre of Cromwell House, home of Sir Charles and Lady Freake, a couple not renowned for their refinements (Lady Freake, it was noted with some amusement, pronounced Homer without the aitch).
These were glittering events. Sets and poses were arranged by the great painters of the time, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones. Gladstone and Tennyson were to be discovered in the audience. The beautiful Eugenie was often to be found playing Helen, of course, and the costumes, poses and ladies received extravagant praise. But, as Beard discovers, the connection between Eugenie and Jane went rather deeper than sharing the same stage.
In fact, it seems likely that they shared a flat and feelings for each other. While Harrison worked up her lectures, Strong was busy booking venues and arranging publicity. At some point, however, there was a "terrific bust-up" and Harrison is later to be found angered by Strong and the "unscrupulous way she used people to get on", while in the drafts of her autobiography Strong refers darkly to the kind of woman who applied "the power of fascination... where she could, on callow youths chiefly and younger women".
Beard is too careful a scholar to draw conclusions about the precise nature of the "bust-up", and too careful a historian to out Harrison and Strong anachronistically as a lesbian couple, but she makes a cogent case for rewriting the history of Classics in a way that would make Harrison less isolated, treating the two women as partners rather than ships that passed in the night. This book does not celebrate a rare and uncomplicated feminine triumph in the still-too-butch Academy, nor does it make easy connections between Harrison's Sapphic life and work, for all its bearded snakes, powerful goddesses and transient gods.
What it does do is evoke wonderfully the kitschy Hellenic craze of the end of the 19th century, female friendship and rivalry and, above all, what it is like to be led by ghosts through an archive - careful ghosts with high expectations of the life you will produce, ghosts with a secret and endless ways to distract you from it with calling cards, precisely measured donations, wrongly labelled photographs and endless other false trails.
