Marginalian Editions – serie

“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 BooksFrom Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison—heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard—that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding.Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a “deeply religious atheist,” Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays—published at the dawn of World War I—unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us—young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane—revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change.As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison’s essays are an “act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo,” challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.

“I fell instantly under the spell of this crepuscular story aglow with love and longing . . . Margaret’s love letter to the mystery of death . . . bittersweet and beautiful like the transience of life itself.” —Maria Popova, from the AfterwordA Marginalian Editions rediscovery, by the author of Goodnight Moon: Margaret Wise Brown’s little-known, deeply moving modern fable about love and loss.In 1948, a year after Margaret Wise Brown had enriched the world of children’s literature with Goodnight Moon, the love of her life fell gravely ill. Attending her partner’s bedside every day, she faced her inconsolable grief in the best way she knew: She wrote a love letter in the form of a children’s book. The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds brings us into a hushed and numinous world, illuminated by Brown’s signature poetic prose.The story begins near the house of an old man who tends to honeybees and asparagus while living on the edge of a magic forest. Behind his home lies the dark wood—a place from which “there is no return”—where golden birds sing through the night and day. When two orphaned children wander onto his farm, he gives them a home and he warns them never to venture past the edge of the wood. When the old man falls ill, however, the boy decides to brave the unknown in search of a cure. What secret knowledge will he find in the dark wood?With lush new illustrations by Ofra Amit and a foreword by Maria Popova, this rediscovered work of uncommon beauty and tenderness lights a path through love and loss for readers of all ages.

“Each page [is] a radiance of curiosity and kindness, the whole of it a bright assurance of the tenacity of life . . . To extend [friendship] across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.” —Maria Popova, from the ForewordFrom Marginalian Editions comes a moving meditation on our connection with other creatures, told through the unforgettable story of a family of blackbirds sharing a birder’s backyard garden.In the savage winter of 1962—Europe’s coldest in eighty years—a blackbird began roosting in the elderberry tree outside Hockley Clarke’s window. Clarke, a retired headmaster and lifelong birder, named him “Blackie” and began bringing him food every morning and evening. What followed was a quiet miracle: an exchange of trust and tenderness between a man and a bird, deepening into something like friendship.First published in 1978, Blackie & Co. is Clarke’s luminous account of the blackbird family that took up residence in his garden. With warmth, humility, and wonder, Clarke records the small, daily rituals through which interspecies connection can take root: a chuckle of greeting, a flight to the hand, a shared rhythm of weather and care. “I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language,” Clarke writes. “There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him.”Echoing the spirit of Gilbert White, J. A. Baker, and Helen Macdonald, Clarke reminds us that our relationships with other species need not be symbolic or sentimental to be profound. With a foreword by Maria Popova—who describes the book as “a bright assurance of the tenacity of life”—Blackie & Co. is a forgotten classic of uncommon grace: a hymn to the unspectacular wonders of the everyday.