T. D. OLVERSON. Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism.

Abstract

For feminists, the classical Greek culture, the so-called height of western civilization, presents a dispiriting picture. There is virtually no surviving information about the daily lives of women; moreover, they had no role in public discourse. As Olverson notes, the misogyny of classical Greek culture gave the nineteenth-century male elite a framework within which to judge—one might say condemn—political activism by women. Yet a surprising number of intellectual women learned Greek on their own or with tutors. Their success in some cases was extraordinary, though invariably even the most expert felt she could not compete with the philological mastery of her male peers. Jane Ellen Harrison was to say late in life that she chose Greek archaeology because she did not trust her mastery of Greek irregular verbs. Yet she had revolutionized the study of ancient Greek culture, with her ground-breaking studies of the pre-Socratic world of chthonic gods and goddesses. Even before her work was published in the early twentieth century, women writers had reworked what Olverson calls ‘the dark side of Hellenism’. Their poetry, fiction, and essays insisted on the centrality of the female, if not actual women, in the ancient world—and its abiding relevance in their own times.