Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison

Michael H. Whitworth

doi:10.1093/notesj/gjw253

Abandoned Lives

The Passion Projects ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691193113.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 50-76

Author(s):

Melanie Micir

Keyword(s):

Life Story ◽

Djuna Barnes ◽

Queer Art ◽

Jane Ellen Harrison

This chapter theorizes biographical failure, such as what happens when it feels impossible to finish telling a life story. It reads two incomplete biographical projects in the context of what Jack Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure”: the recognition and reframing of failure as one possible form of the deliberate subversion of heteronormative metrics of success. Djuna Barnes worked for decades to turn the attempted autobiography of her Dadaist friend, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, into a publishable biography. Hope Mirrlees compiled a series of half-done drafts, notes, and outlines toward the biography of her late mentor, friend, and intimate companion, the celebrated Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Though their projects were very different, neither Barnes nor Mirrlees would finish their biographies or consent to let anyone else take over their projects. The chapter reframes the discourse of failure surrounding both projects and suggests that these so-called failures represent acts of resistance to the normalizing pull of typical biographical narratives.

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Weston, Jessie (1850–1928)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/0123456789-rem1841-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joel Hawkes

Keyword(s):

Comparative Study ◽

Ritual Practice ◽

Grail Legend ◽

Christian Origins ◽

Jane Ellen Harrison

Jessie Laidlay Weston was a British independent scholar and folklorist best known for her influential study From Ritual to Romance (1920), which sought to trace the Christian grail legend, specifically the story of the Fisher King, back to pre-Christian origins. Her analysis draws from Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of religion, The Golden Bough (1890), and its claim that modern religion evolved from older fertility cults and their rites of the dying god/king. The ‘Cambridge Ritualists’, who also took much inspiration from Frazer, likewise influenced Weston—particularly the work of Jane Ellen Harrison—with their theories of ritual practice and their shared belief that ritual preceded myth, with storytelling always an explanation of older rites.

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