REMINISCENCES OF A STUDENT'S LIFE

A chronicle of a Victorian woman’s changing times.

This charming memoir by classicist and educator Harrison (1850-1928), published in 1925 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and now reissued with an introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn, offers a graceful portrait of a spirited woman. At times curmudgeonly, at times irreverent, always shrewdly perceptive, Harrison, who describes herself as a proud Yorkshire woman, declares her hatred for the British Empire, which, she writes, “stands to me for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought; within it are always and necessarily the seeds of war.” Educated by governesses, she was raised in a family “singularly old-fashioned and provincial even for those days.” Her father, shy, absent-minded, and taciturn, believed that money-earning women brought disgrace on the men of the family, a discouraging attitude for a girl who wanted to be independent. When she finally attended school, she found Victorian education “ingeniously useless” and its values “the abyss of fatuous prudery.” Cambridge’s Newnham College, where she enrolled in 1874, proved far different. Since women’s colleges were then a novelty, they attracted distinguished visitors, including Turgenev, Ruskin, Gladstone, and—to Harrison’s delight—George Eliot. Moreover, she socialized with “a class of Victorian who, if not exactly distinguished, were at least distinctive”: British lions and lionesses, such as philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his wife, and their friends Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney. Harrison recalls, as well, her impressions of Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. After 15 years of teaching in London, “borne along by the irresistible tide of adventure,” she left to pursue studies in archaeology, which took her to Greece and informed her scholarship. For a few years before she published her memoir, she lived in France, hoping “to see things more freely and more widely, and, above all, to get the new focus of another civilisation.”

Captivating recollections.