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The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Annabel Robinson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 332. $70.00 (cloth).
Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) was a colorful and controversial classicist in a (usually) stodgy and conformist profession. A friend of Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf, she was one of the first female dons, an outspoken maverick, fond of cigarettes and whiskey, whose most productive years were her 50s and 60s. A bitter foe of Christianity and the Olympian gods of Hellas, she celebrated emotion and ritual over rationalism and theology and escaped the confines of the Victorian-Edwardian world into the heady mists of prehistoric Greece and the comfort of its orgiastic chthonic cults. "Greek plays," she wrote, "I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes" (282). A pioneer multidisciplinist, she blended sociological and anthropological insights with archaeological and philological data, but her ruling passions were emotion and intuition. Her vitalist vision of Greek religion (indebted in part to Nietzsche) unsettled the arid proprieties of classicist orthodoxy, and most of her peers deplored what they viewed as her feminine excesses. Her influence was greatest beyond classical circles. In a learned publication, she freely enthused: "Dionysius is a human youth, lovely with curled hair, but in a moment he is a Wild Bull and a...