Alpha and Omega

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of a prosperous timber broker; her mother died soon after she was born. Educated at home as a child, Harrison enrolled in 1874 in the newly established Newnham College for women, at Cambridge University, where she later taught. In 1903 Harrison published her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, followed in 1912 by Themis, works that synthesized new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionize the study of ancient Greek civilization. A popular lecturer whose articles enjoyed a wide readership, Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and spent her last years in Paris with her “spiritual daughter,” the poet Hope Mirrlees.Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.

“Although she lamented living through an ‘anti-rational age’ . . . Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life.—Maria Popova, from the Foreword“Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced . . . She remains my hero . . . She has remained the iron in my soul.”—Mary Beard, London Review of Books“When I compare . . . Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated.”—Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman“I love reading the British linguist, classicist, pacifist, early feminist, and self-styled heretic, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1927). A scholar of Greek antiquity, Harrison . . . revolutionized the study of the classics, especially in matters of culture and religion, by emphasizing the primacy of customs and practices over theology and explicit belief . . . It is worth emphasizing just how radical an innovation it was at the time, and the extent to which she understood its complexity . . . Harrison’s personal attitude remained ever defiant, her trademark being less the grand dame of academe and more the erstwhile enfant terrible turned eminence grise of free thinking.”—Jack Hanson, Defector“She wrote with a pathos and engagement rare among her academic peers, and her whole approach to the classics . . . seemed to open up new worlds of thought and feeling . . . One [has] to admire the passion and restless originality of her mind and the fructifying influence of her work on other writers.”—Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

• Foreword by Maria PopovaPrefaceI “Crabbed Age and Youth”II Heresy and HumanityIII Unanimism and ConversionIV “Homo Sum”: Being a Letter to an Anti-suffragist From an AnthropologistV Scientiæ Sacra FamesVI The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of ReligionsVII Alpha and OmegaVIII Art and Mr. Clive BellEpilogue on the War: Peace With Patriotism