Goddesses and ghosts: Virginia Woolf and Jane Ellen Harrison

This study proposes to adjust the thinking of Virginia Woolf scholars in terms of the boundaries and origins of Woolf's intellectual and political views by definitively positioning her in dialogue with the theories and practices of Cambridge classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison. While Jane Harrison is known to historians of anthropology and those searching for the origins of Structuralism, she is more frequently remembered as the intellectual leader of the Cambridge Ritualists, a community of scholars pushing the disciplinary boundaries of Classics as they created new fields in anthropology and archaeology. Harrison's pioneering work on the matrifocal origins of Greek religion, especially Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912) marked only the beginning of the profound effect Harrison's ideas had on Virginia Woolf. In addition to charting markers of Harrison's feminist mythography throughout the trajectory of Woolf's writing life, I argue that the questions preoccupying Harrison resonated with Woolf as she adapted these ideas to her own intellectual pursuits. What is the relationship of the family and women to the state? What are the sources of violence and war? What role can gender play in effecting social change? What are the roots of patriarchy and the possibilities of alternative social systems? How do universal structures, like language and time, function and govern culture? And what role can art play in changing our lives? I hope that by restoring the connections between these two major feminist intellectuals to show the significance of the questions they grappled with to their own time and the relevance of their ideas to contemporary audiences today.