"Although she lamented living through an 'anti-rational age' . . . Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life.

--Maria Popova, from the Foreword

"Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced . . . She remains my hero . . . She has remained the iron in my soul."

--Mary Beard, London Review of Books

"When I compare . . . Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated."

--Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman

"I love reading the British linguist, classicist, pacifist, early feminist, and self-styled heretic, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1927). A scholar of Greek antiquity, Harrison . . . revolutionized the study of the classics, especially in matters of culture and religion, by emphasizing the primacy of customs and practices over theology and explicit belief . . . It is worth emphasizing just how radical an innovation it was at the time, and the extent to which she understood its complexity . . . Harrison's personal attitude remained ever defiant, her trademark being less the grand dame of academe and more the erstwhile enfant terrible turned eminence grise of free thinking."

--Jack Hanson, Defector

"She wrote with a pathos and engagement rare among her academic peers, and her whole approach to the classics . . . seemed to open up new worlds of thought and feeling . . . One [has] to admire the passion and restless originality of her mind and the fructifying influence of her work on other writers."

--Roger Kimball, The New Criterion