Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman--as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens.

This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image. And she contrasts her story with that of Eugénie Sellers Strong, a younger contemporary and onetime intimate, the author of major work on Roman art and once a glittering figure at the British School in Rome--but who lost the race for renown. The setting for the story of Harrison's career is Classical scholarship in this period--its internal arguments and allegiances and especially the influence of the anthropological strain most strikingly exemplified by Sir James Frazer. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual "influence" and "movements," Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of Classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene. The Invention of Jane Harrisonoffers shrewd history and undiluted fun.

"[A] provocative biography...Among the many questions which Mary Beard asks is why Harrison was singled out for celebrity...[Beard] has filled a gap, and in vivacious style."

"Clever and beautiful...[Jane Harrison] earned the permanent admiration of the Classics faculty at Cambridge. Eugénie Sellers, Harrison's younger protegée and one-time close friend, was equally talented in the field of Roman antiquities...Yet her name is virtually forgotten...Beard's gripping little book is an attempt to set the record a little straighter on Harrison. It is also an attempt to put Sellers back...As Beard ably persuades us, their story is one that can be repeated wherever in history women, through their achievements, appear on the public stage. Whether the trace of that appearance endures for posterity has this far depended on how they fit into the stories male historians tell. From now on, though, chroniclers such as Beard are going to be far more vigilant."

This is not your traditional biography, though it gives a vivid, in-depth feel of the times: the intellectual impact of archaeology in the late 19th century, 'coded games of literary sapphism in the 1920s and 1930s', performances of Greek plays. It is essentially a detective story. Like Wilkie Collins's The Moonstoneit turns on an absence: something deliberately mislaid from the legend of Jane Harrison. Persuasively as an archaeologist reconstructing gold earlobes in a Mycenean mask, Beard writes [Eugénie Sellers's] life back into Harrison's.

"Anyone climbing aboard this careering mystery tour of a book should be prepared to be taken for a ride. It looks like a biography: faded snapshots, footnotes, gossip around the famous...But this is no biography to any orthodox sense. On the contrary, it is a cluster of didactic essays which amusingly but relentlessly insist that orthodox biography is a fraud, that its claims to uncover the truth are delusory."

Mary Beardhas a Chair of Classics at <>Cambridgeand is a Fellow of Newnham College.

Foreword

Preface

Illustrations

1. Prolegomena

2. Mrs. Arthur Strong: Apotheosis and After Life

3. Unanimism

4. Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature

5. Introductory Studies in Greek Art

6. Alpha and Omega

7. Ancient Art and Ritual

8. Hellas at Cambridge

9. Pandora's Box

10. Epilegomena

Lifelines

Notes

Major Archival Sources

Bibliography

Index