Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism by Jean Mills (review)

Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism constitutes an important and timely study of Virginia Woolf’s intriguing intellectual relationship with Jane Ellen Harrison. Jean Mills’s most important contribution is her deployment of the term “transpersonal” as an interpretative lever to unlock the relationship between these two towering figures of British feminist letters. “The Harrison-Woolf relationship,” argues Mills, “begins initially by reading, evolves into an intellectual mentorship, but shifts ultimately away from any notion of descent to one of shared ambitions, overlapping politics, and friendship” (p. 3). Mills, therefore, borrows Nancy K. Miller’s phrasing, “‘transpersonal,’ a connection sideways,” terms capable of “articulat[ing] the shift away from the vertical axis of mentorship to the aspects of the Harrison/Woolf relationship that were also lateral, or interjacent in nature, becoming ultimately an interactive project of shared ambitions and objectives” (p. 4).

In the introduction, Mills delineates the objectives of her project: to disembed Woolf from the retrospectively (often) misappropriating clutches and symbolic parameters of the Bloomsbury group; to expatiate on Harrison’s turn to the preclassical, ritualistic aspect of Greek religion and uncover similar patterns in Woolf’s work; and, finally, to use pacifism as the cornerstone of Woolf’s socio-political stance before the unwelcome developments of the 1930s. Here Mills also offers a restorative account of Harrison’s pre-Cambridge life as a female public intellectual whose passionate, theatrical lectures constitute, with hindsight, one of the most exciting facets of the otherwise tired, male-dominated neo-Hellenic dream of the 1880s and 1890s. In the first chapter, Mills examines the role of Janet Case, Woolf’s favorite tutor, and the ways in which her tutelage echoed Harrisonian re-evaluations of the Greek classics that, in tandem, indelibly marked Woolf’s budding literary aesthetics. In the second chapter, the author mobilizes Harrison’s re-evaluation of the significatory currency of Olympian Zeus and explores Woolf’s novels—Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), and The Waves (1931)—through the prism of the Greek goddess in myth and ritual. She also provides a very informative account of two of Woolf’s Greek notebooks, the “Agamemnon” (1922) and “The Libation Bearers” (1907), and contextualizes her work beyond modernism’s “mythic method” within a distinctive feminist aesthetics and politics (p. 64).¹ Chapters three and four provide a rigorous examination of A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) and emphasize the need to insist on pacifism as a crucial factor in Woolf’s and Harrison’s shared political orientation. Chapter five offers a compelling analysis of Woolf’s politics through Harrison’s late fascination with Russia, whilst in the afterword Mills provides the reader with nothing short of a wonderful account of why we need to (re-)establish Harrison as a crucially important feminist public intellectual in British literary and intellectual history.

All that being said, whilst Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism constitutes a powerful account of Harrison’s neglected legacy in Anglo-American feminist history, it is, regrettably, not an entirely satisfactory study of Woolf’s relationship with classicism and an even less satisfactory account of what the author calls “the spirit of modernist classicism.” Mills’s agenda to wrest both Harrison and Woolf from the perceived clutches of anything that remotely recalls a “masculine” influence (logos, the Olympian pantheon, Apollo, and so on) prevents her otherwise perceptive analysis from fully highlighting the real-life challenges that women of letters, especially classicists, had to face and the entrenched gender bias they had to negotiate. To my mind, only by underscoring the ambivalence and intellectual vacillations between masculine and feminine, rational and irrational, and classical and preclassical traditions can any attempt to uncover Woolf’s and Harrison’s route through British Hellenism be complete and can the roundness that both women were...