The Invention of Jane Harrison

[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. * The Economist *
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. -- Lisa Jardine * The Times *
In her new, invigorating study of the pioneering Cambridge archaeologist Jane Harrison, biographer Mary Beard quarrels with those who believe they can reconstruct the private life of Harrison with any sort of certainty… The Invention of Jane Harrison shows its seams proudly. Indeed, it calls into question the whole idea of seamless biography, offering instead one more construction, one more invention of a Cambridge myth and idol. But in examining closely a previously neglected period (in the formation of Harrison and Sellers), Beard illuminates the hidden forces at play in the process of hagiography: how undercurrents of sexuality, passion, jealousy, even love, are suppressed in the re-writing (or even the non-writing or the de-writing) of a life. Felicitously composed and exhaustively documented, this quirky biography demonstrates as well the verve and invention of Mary Beard. -- Thomas Jenkins * Boston Book Review *
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 Moonstone it 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. -- Ruth Padel * Independent on Sunday *
Here is an anti-biography, which confronts previous versions of Harrison’s life… Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explains Harrison’s formative years in London, and asks, rather than answers, a series of key questions… The result is an amusing, engaging and opinionated book that looks behind the scenes to find out how biography is invented. -- Julia Briggs * London Review of Books *
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. -- Oliver Taplin * The Independent *
This book is an intriguing read, giving fascinating insight into Harrison’s early days and into the intellectual scene of Classics a century ago. * Classical Association News *
This volume is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the life of Jane Harrison. Intellectually it belongs not to biography proper but to the genre of ‘Rezeptionsgeschichte.’ Its author is constantly, and refreshingly, alive to the nature of evidence… Here, in The Invention of Jane Harrison, the author designs to explore ‘the myth(s) of Jane Harrison,’ to determine how these myths were ‘constructed and reconstructed,’ and the purposes of revelation, dissimulation and occlusion of these myths. The author is, almost always, refreshingly alive to problems of social-anachronism… Dr. Beard’s is an interesting book, excellently researched and usually sane and sensible, and well worth reading. -- P. G. Naiditch * The Classical Bulletin *