Lessons in Greek Art: Jane Harrison and Aestheticism

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Notes

¹Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, ed. Michèle Barrett (London and New York: Penguin, 1993), 15.

²Ibid., 72.

³For Harrison's influence on modernism see for instance Martha Carpentier, Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998); K. J. Phillips, “Jane Harrison and Modernism,” Journal of Modern Literature 17.4 (1991): 465–476; and Renate Schlesier, “Prolegomena to Jane Harrison's Interpretation of Ancient Greek Religion,” in Cambridge Ritualists, ed. William M. Calder (Atlanta: Scolar P, 1991), 185–226.

⁴Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

⁵Yopie Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999), 43–81.

⁶On the new women's colleges see Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 81 ff. Hurst traces the development from independent to communal learning in the history of nineteenth-century women's study of the classics.

⁷Jane Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life (London: Hogarth P, 1925), 89.

⁸Information about the lectures is taken from Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 75–77.

⁹These figures come from two interviews with Harrison: “Interview with Miss Jane E. Harrison, Archaeologist and Lecturer on Greek Art,” Women's Penny Paper, 44.1 (24 August 1889); and “A Woman's View of the Greek Question: An Interview with Miss Jane Harrison,” Pall Mall Gazette (4 November 1891).

¹⁰The pamphlet is preserved in the Harrison Papers in Newnham College, Cambridge, 4/2.

FIGURE 1 Front page of a pamphlet that advertises ten lectures on “Athens, its Mythology and Art” (1890). With permission from the Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge.

¹¹For an analysis of Harrison's use of “problem photographs,” see Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, esp. 104.

¹²Jane Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (London: Rivingtons, 1882), vii.

¹³Virginia Woolf. “On Not Knowing Greek,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–94), vol. 4, 38–53, 48–49.

¹⁴For readings of Woolf's important essay see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–6; Rowena Fowler, “Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf's Greece,” Comparative Literature 51.3 (1999), 217–242; and Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, 220–222.

¹⁵Shanyn Fiske gives a strong account of Harrison's sense of inadequacy by analyzing her relationship to Greek in terms of exile; see Fiske, Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Athens: Ohio UP, 2008), esp. 152–160.

¹⁶These are the words of the archaeologist Lewis R. Farnell, one of Pater's pupils, in his memoir An Oxonian Looks Back (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934), 77.

¹⁷“The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” originally appeared in the Fortnightly Review in February and March 1880; “The Marbles of Aegina” was published in the same journal in the following month.

¹⁸Walter Pater, “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture,” Greek Studies, in The New Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 7, 188.

¹⁹Ibid., 189.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹Walter Pater, “Preface,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1980), xix.

²²Pater, “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture,” resp. 191 and 190.

²³Harrison, “Syllabus of a Course of six Lectures on the Mythology of the Parthenon Marbles in Special relation to Recent Investigations,” n/d, 2.

²⁴Pater, “Preface” to The Renaissance, xix–xx.

²⁵Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature, xii–xiii.

²⁶For a full treatment of aesthetic Hellenism see Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece; the influence of aestheticism on the first generation of professional women classicists is treated specifically on 75–80.

²⁷Pater, “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture,” 191 and 192.

²⁸“A Woman's View of the Greek Question.”

²⁹Letter from Burne-Jones to William Kenrick, dated November 1885; in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), vol. 2, 158. William Kenrick came from a successful family of hardware manufacturers; he contributed to the launch of the National Education League and became the chairman of the Birmingham School of Art in 1883. In the 1880s he made important contributions to the consolidation of artistic and cultural institutions in Birmingham. Roy Church, “Kenrick family (per. c.1785–1926),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online ed., Jan. 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53590, accessed 25 July 2010].

³⁰Burne-Jones documents the genesis of this project in a recently recovered letter to Harrison, dated 31 January 1892. Newnham College Archive, Hope Mirrlees Papers, 1/1/3.

³¹Jane Harrison and D. S. MacColl, Greek Vase Paintings: A Selection of Examples (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 5.

³²For a list of Wilde's lectures in Britain and Ireland see Geoff Dibb, “Oscar Wilde's Lecture Tours of the United Kingdom, 1883–85,” The Wildean 29 (2006), 2–11.

³³See for instance “The English Renaissance or Art” and “The House Beautiful,” originally delivered in America as “The Practical Application of the Principles of Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration, With Observations upon Dress and Personal Ornaments”; both in volume 14 of the Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross, 15 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993).

³⁴Harrison, “Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on the Mythology of the Parthenon Marbles in Special relation to Recent Investigations,” 5.

³⁵“A Woman's View of the Greek Question.”

³⁶Ana Parejo Vadillo gives a vivid description of the social networks of aestheticism at this time, based on A. Mary F. Robinson's salon in her home in 84 Gower Street. See Vadillo, “Aestheticism ‘At Home’ in London: A. Mary F. Robinson and the Aesthetic Sect,” in London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image, ed. Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 59–78. For Harrison's account of her involvement in the social life connected to aestheticism see her Reminiscences of a Student's Life, 46–48.

³⁷“Introduction,” Magazine of Art 1 (January 1878), 1–4, resp. 4 and 1.

³⁹Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), 2–3.

³⁸C. T. Newton, “Hellenic Studies: An Introductory Address,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 1 (1880), 1–6, 1. This issue includes a list of officers and member of the Society. Harrison's allies C. T. Newton and Sidney Colvin were two of its vice-presidents.

⁴⁰In the introduction to her forthcoming monograph, Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins suggests that this question of gender and authority should be understood through Bonnie Smith's notion of a late nineteenth-century culture of “high amateurism” that enabled women, in Prins's specific case Harrison and other female classicists, to open new forms of inquiry into traditionally male fields.

⁴¹Harrison, “The Pictures of Sappho,” Woman's World 1.6 (May 1888), 274–278.

⁴²Ibid., 276. Isobel Hurst reads this essay as a defense of female intellectual communities, highlighting its relevance to the contemporary debate on women's higher education. See Hurst, “Ancient and Modern Women in the Woman's World,” Victorian Studies 52.1 (Autumn 2009), 42–51.

⁴⁵Ibid.

⁴³Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life, 51.

⁴⁴“A Woman's View of the Greek Question.”