I recently raced through Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, a charming memoir by Jane Ellen Harrison, a Victorian classicist who popularized Greek culture. 

This spare, witty memoir is sprinkled with delightful anecdotes, but I wish it had been longer: Harris seems to be the only Victorian minimalist. She describes her Yorkshire childhood (she fantasizes about reading Plato in a castle while her ladies go out to the Hunt), her intense education at Cambridge (she infuriated Gladstone by telling him that Euripides, that most shocking of Greek tragedians, was her favorite writer), and her resistance to Greek textual criticism, which didn’t give her scope for research on Greek religion, but  “…we were soon to see two great lights – archaeology and anthropology.”  These two disciplines supported her theory that myth, art, and literature grew out of religious rituals, and not vice versa. 

She writes, “When I say ‘religion,’ I am instantly obliged to correct myself; it is not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me.”  

Harrison was educated at Newnham, the first women’s college at Cambridge, and was a brilliant student of Greek and religion who graduated with the highest score on the religion exam.  But she was also an ordinary young woman and a fan of popular and literary culture:  she enjoyed meeting celebrities, especially George Eliot, who visited Cambridge. 

Harrison writes ecstatically,

It was in the days when her cult was at its height – thank heaven I never left her shrine! – and we used to wait outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new installments of Daniel Deronda.  She came for a few minutes to my room, and I was almost senseless with excitement.

After graduation, Harrison was rejected for teaching jobs at Cambridge and the University of London. The glass ceiling was a futuristic concept. In  her own words, she became a “fatally fluent” lecturer and popularizer of Greek culture.  For 15 years. she did this exhausting work.  Finally, she was invited back to Newnham to teach and devote herself to her research. 

My favorite part of the book is Daniel Mendelsohn’s lively Foreword, in which he puts her life and work in context.  He begins by noting that Virginia Woolf mentions “J__ H__” is in A Room of One’s Own. 

A good read, and very fast.