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HARRISON, Jane Ellen.. Reminiscences of a Student's Life.. London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925, 1925.

Price: US$974.66 + shipping

Description: First edition, first impression, of the autobiography of linguist and classical scholar Jane Harrison, one of the first women to establish a reputation as a professional academic, and whose groundbreaking work influenced a generation of modernists. Born in 1850, Harrison fought an uphill struggle to be acknowledged as a scholar. "After leaving university, the academic posts she applied for went first to her male peers, then to the male students of her male peers; it was not until she returned to Newnham College, at the age of almost fifty, that she found an all-female community which gave her the validation, time and money she needed to produce the works which made her name - and which paved the way for female writers and public thinkers, such as Woolf, Power, Sayers, and H.D." (Wade, p. 11). In her essay "Scientiae Sacra Fames", Harrison uses the phrase "a home of her own" and argues that the intellectual emancipation of women depends upon their access to private spaces of study and contemplation, distinct from the communal domestic sphere. Harrison offered Woolf a rare model of freedom and was immortalized in A Room of One's Own as "a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress - could it be the famous scholar, could it be J- H- herself?". Harrison died just months before Woolf delivered, at Newnham College, the lecture which would become A Room of One's Own. Woolmer 64. Jane Ellen Harrison, "Scientiae Sacra Fames", Alpha and Omega, 1915; Francesca Wade, Square Haunting, 2020. Small octavo. Original red and black marble-patterned cloth, title label on spine lettered and ruled in red, top edge red, others untrimmed. With dust jacket. With 6 plates. Cloth slightly bubbled but bright, a few gatherings proud, contents a touch foxed. A near-fine copy in very good jacket, spine rubbed and toned with small loss to title, a few chips and short closed tears to edges, lightly soiled, a scarce survival.

Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom