ABSTRACT
Both born in the decade following the publication of the first modern guidebook to Greece, Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926) and Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) were Cambridge-based scholars whose interest in Greece went beyond a holiday pastime. In ‘Hellas at Cambridge’, an article for the Magazine of Art, from which the preceding extract is taken, Harrison points to the subservience of Greek art to the more highly regarded forms of Classical study, namely, textual. Reclaiming the visual from the derivative, she extended the interest in visual material beyond the holiday occupation for the tourist in Greece to a very different stage, one that could contribute to modern Britain. The distinction between ‘holiday’ and ‘lifework’ is telling, especially in relation to visual versus textual media; the type of labour associated with both was determined by class as well as gender. In, ‘“On Not Knowing Greek:” The Classics and the Woman of Letters’, Rowena Fowler maps a network of allusions to the Classics in the writings of a variety of British women writers, from George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, tracing in each the anxiety of women’s purchase on Ancient Greek. For Fowler, ‘[n]o woman could take the classics for granted. Starting Latin or Greek was a journey into alien territory and for some women the sense of strangeness never entirely wore off’ (Fowler 1983, 337). This sense of ‘strangeness’ and distance from Greece was compounded by the lack of resources available for learning Greek. Taking her cue from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora, who begins to write ‘Lady’s Greek without the accents’ (Browning II: 74-7), Yopie Prins identifies a community of women working on Greece through
a feminist lens that used the dissonance of ‘Lady’s Greek’ as a critical imperative.1 Yet the level of this discussion is mostly typographical rather than topological: the actual presence and figure of Greek letters and learning represented access to an arena that admitted discussion of eros and democracy for the middle and upper-class British woman.2 For these women, Modern Greece remained a terra incognita, a site radically divorced from their own national and sexual refiguring. Lewis and Harrison were among the relatively few Victorian women actively engaging with the study of Greece in their writing who actually travelled to witness the scene of their argument.3
