160 biography Vol. 12, No. 2 Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 350 pp. $39.50. Any biography of the eminent comparative anthropologist-religionist James G. Frazer , author of, among other monumental studies, The Golden Bough, faces the fundamental challenge of dispelling the myth of the man as "consummate solitary literary drudge" (4). The phrase is biographer Robert Ackerman's own to describe the picture that has emerged of Frazer from his contemporaries. Ackerman does not convince us otherwise, but that shortcoming hardly signals a failure on the biographer's part: writing a thrilling biography of an anthropologist who never left the armchair represents the almost impossible. Nonetheless, Frazer's position as a forefather of modern anthropology, and his highly significant literary influence, merit a serious critical biography, and Ackerman certainly has given us the definitive version. Ackerman's scrupulous research of Frazer 's personal and professional correspondence gives us as complete a portrait of the man as seems possible or desirable. Ackerman shrewdly resists the temptation, at all points, to settle for the easy generalization of the man: yes, Frazer was retiring and reticent , particularly in middle and old age; but on the other hand, he was capable of wit, and formed some fast and enduring friendships, at least one of which, with his mentor William Robertson Smith, possessed deep emotional ties. Probably the most interesting aspect of Frazer's personal life was his marriage to Elizabeth (Lily) de Boys Grove, the later Lady Frazer who became known as a veritable "Dragon" to all those who worked with or around Frazer. Ackerman's account of Lady Frazer is detailed and judicious. While he chronicles and supports then-current observations of her as "rude, overbearing, and peremptory" (126), he nonetheless attempts to balance the portrait of a woman who, in Frazer's polite academic circles, had no "defenders." Ackerman rightly points out that her French, and non-academic, background did not reconcile well with "the august, often stuffy, and sometimes intimidating world of Cambridge that she entered upon her marriage" (125). And, he emphasizes, all of Lady Frazer's efforts were bent to build and fortify her husband's reputation. Still, Ackerman goes even further than Lady Frazer's early detractors to suggest that her successful efforts at closeting Sir James had more than personal repercussions : among other effects, "in view of the fact that his entire life was devoted to speculations about the psychology and motives of others, it cannot have helped that he came to know fewer and fewer people as he grew older" (126). Ackerman's discussion of Frazer's anthropological theories, and the place of those concepts within the social science of the day, is, given the biographer's literary background , surprisingly keen and comprehensive. Indeed, Ackerman demonstrates a thorough command of the social science of the day and Frazer's complex place in it. For example, his discussion of Frazer's treatment of the relation of myth to ritual lays out the complexities, and contradictions, of Frazer's line of thinking, never once settling for the pat generality that might pigeonhole Frazer's evershifting ideas. In this respect, Ackerman sheds significant light on Frazer's relation to the Cambridge Ritualists, such as Jane Harrison and F. M. Cornford, who, often through comparison with contemporary "savages" and folk culture, asserted the "primitive" and ritualbased nature of early Greek religion, and did so under the heavy influence of Frazer's various texts. Ackerman's research demonstrates that Frazer refused the label of REVIEWS 161 ritualist, claiming that, for one, all myths hardly could have evolved from ritual origins ; indeed, Ackerman shows Frazer explicitly challenging the ritualists who claimed him as a theoretical godfather. Ackerman takes advantage of his own literary orientation when discussing the writerly aspects of Frazer's works. Frazer was compulsively unable to rein in the great multitude of examples attached to each of his theories, and Ackerman does well in documenting Frazer's digressiveness and theorizing on the motives behind this almost maniacal drive to textual expansion. And Ackerman is keen when discussing the "license of the imaginative artist" (102-03) that Frazer insisted upon carrying...