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"Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of a prosperous timber broker; her mother died soon after she was born. Educated at home as a child, Harrison enrolled in 1874 in the newly established Newnham College for women, at Cambridge University, where she later taught. In 1903 Harrison published her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, followed in 1912 by Themis, works that synthesized new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionize the study of ancient Greek civilization. A popular lecturer whose articles enjoyed a wide readership, Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and spent her last years in Paris with her ""spiritual daughter,"" the poet Hope Mirrlees. Daniel Mendelsohn's books include The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, and translations of the collected poems of Sappho and C. P. Cavafy."
"""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.""--Mary Beard ""The Guardian"" ""When I compare . . . Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated.""--Virginia Woolf ""New Statesman"""
