"Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . Reminiscences of a Student's Life [is] a tremendous read . She remains my hero . because she was so sharply aware of the stories women needed to be told about succeeding as a woman; and she was brilliant at telling them. She has remained the iron in my soul." --Mary Beard, London Review of Books "Captivating recollections . This charming memoir by classicist and educator Harrison (1850-1928), published in 1925 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and now reissued with an introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn, offers a graceful portrait of a spirited woman.

At times curmudgeonly, at times irreverent, always shrewdly perceptive." -- Kirkus Reviews "[Her] intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense . and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated." --Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman "Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about ancient Greek culture--peeling back that calm, white marble exterior to reveal something much more violent, messy and ecstatic underneath ('bloody Jane' they called her, for more reasons than one, I suspect). And she was the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense--an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer. She made it possible for me to do what I do." --Mary Beard, The Guardian "A groundbreaking heroine of intellectual life . [Harrison's] breezy and highly entertaining memoir .

gives a powerful sense of what made its author at once so fascinating and so important." --Daniel Mendelsohn, from the Foreword "Harrison was a vivid and controversial intellectual presence both in this country and in England, particularly among writers (Yeats and D. H. Lawrence are among those who acknowledged her influence) . 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.