Jane Ellen Harrison

Biography

(1850-1928)

Jane Ellen Harrison was born in 1850 at Cottingham, Yorkshire in England. A month after Harrison was born, her mother passed away and Harrison was raised by a series of governesses. Through the tutelage of these governesses and by her own efforts she became proficient in Latin, German, and Greek before she was 17 years old. Indeed, scholarship became the pattern of her life as she was admitted to various schools for women and ultimately studied at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1874 where she thrived as a Classicist. The bulk of her publications are scholarly works on Greek religion, history, and art. Among them are the respected Art and Ancient Ritual, Themis, and Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. She spent the later half of her life in France still writing and still a scholar. Before she died in 1928, she published her autobiographical Reminiscences of a Student's Life.

(Compiled by Ryan Blodgett)

See also

Essays by Jane Ellen Harrison

Art and Mr. Clive Bell

Art, then, to me is not the creation of significant form, hollow of content, but the fettering of reality by form--a widely different thing.

Crabbed age and youth

Youth is naturally and necessarily egocentric, Crabbed Age by compulsion altruistic; they stand, it seems, for the two integral factors of our morality--self and the other.
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