Reminiscences of a Student's Life
Jane Ellen Harrison was the first woman to hold a professorship at a British university, and this memoir is the story of how she carved that impossible path through the heart of Victorian England. Written with disarming honesty and sharp humor, it traces her Yorkshire childhood, her education by governesses, her father's old-fashioned views, and the small rebellions that would bloom into a lifetime of intellectual defiance. But this is not mere autobiography. As the Spanish edition brilliantly notes, Harrison was also constructing a version of herself, freezing into memory a glamorous and carefully crafted self-portrait that would help cement her legacy as one of the most famous classicists of her era. She knew George Eliot, corresponded with Oscar Wilde, influenced Virginia Woolf (who credited this memoir in "A Room of One's Own"), and moved through Cambridge, London, and the Paris of the roaring twenties. She loved freely, men and women both, and in her sixties, remarkably, began learning Russian and moved to Russia to start over. A book about becoming yourself in an era that insisted you remain small.
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“Life does not cease when you are old, it only suffers a rich change. You go on loving, only your love, instead of a burning, fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of an autumn sun.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable and relevant. I went to Rome with a young friend, educated on the latest lines, and who had taken historical honours at Cambridge. The first morning the pats of butter came up stamped with the Twins. “ Good old Romulus and Remus,” said I. “ Good old who? ” said she. She had never heard of the Twins and was much bored when I told her the story; they had no place in “ con¬ stitutional history ”, and for her the old wolf of the Capitol howled in vain: “ Great God! I’d rather be ”!””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“At his house I often met Henry James. I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me he had no appeal.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. “ Each book ”, he said gravely, “ that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.” I thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own works bound in dark blue calf!””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“And then last, but oh, so utterly first, came George Eliot. It was in the days when her cult was at its height”
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horseman¬ ship, as already hinted, is nothing to “ write home about ”, but compared to those German professors I am a centaur.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
“When I first came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London life was costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the worst, with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully face the Workhouse.””
— Jane Ellen Harrison
