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.
