Saturday, September 4, 2010

My hero / Jane Ellen Harrison by Mary Beard

 


Detail of a painting of Jane Ellen Harrison.


My hero: 

Jane Ellen Harrison

by Mary Beard


Mary Beard
Saturday 4 September 2010

I

wouldn't have wanted to spend much time with her. She was far too histrionic, too satisfied with her own cleverness and even more self-obsessed than the average early 20th-century don. But 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.

Harrison went up to Cambridge in 1874 to read classics at Newnham College. Though she missed a first (to her life-long annoyance), she was already an academic celebrity – and a trouble-maker. As a student, she even faced down William Gladstone, by claiming that her favourite Greek writer was the sceptical playwright Euripides (not, as the old man hoped, the pious Homer). Taken aback, he stuttered and walked away.

Through the 1880s she made her living in London as a journalist and by giving lectures, with ingenious sound effects and gas-powered lantern slides. It was mass entertainment: 1,600 people once turned out in Glasgow to hear her talk on Athenian gravestones (those were the days). In 1898 she went back to a fellowship in Cambridge, to write the books that would offer an entirely new vision of the ancient world. The austere titles (Themis, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and others) conceal a heady mixture of Nietzsche, Durkheim, bull-leaping – and, of course, blood.

Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. She fell repeatedly, volubly and unsuccessfully in love. When Virginia Woolf gave the lecture that became A Room of One's Own in Cambridge in 1928, she thought she glimpsed Harrison's ghost in Newnham's gardens. I sometimes see it too.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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