Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy

by Yopie Prins

In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a dead language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote some Greek upon the margin--lady's Greek, without the accents. Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission.



Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies--Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae--to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges.

The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

Genres: Nonfiction, Victorian

312 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Yopie Prins is Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research includes classical reception, comparative literature, historical poetics, lyric theory, translation studies and Victorian poetry.

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Prins explores how (white, upper-class) 'ladies' in the Victorian era (and Edwardian, and on up through the 1930s) used their acts of translating Greek tragedy (including into English and into performance) to construct their identities as "women of letters," gaining legitimacy as authors (obviating their anxiety of authorship), as college/university students, and as New Women. She discusses Elizabeth Barrett Browning's and Virginia Woolf's work on translating the Agamemnon, as well as Woolf's famous essay "On Not Knowing Greek"; Janet Case's and Edith Hamilton's translations of the Prometheus Bound; performances by students at Girton College (of Cambridge) and Smith College of Sophocles' Electra; translations of Euripides' Hippolytus by A. Mary F. Robinson (a friend of John Addington Symonds and fellow 'aesthete', if women really could be; she also had a relationship with Lee Vernon) and H.D.; and finally work on/performances of the Bacchae by Jane Harrison and Eva Palmer Sikelianos, whom she credits with reviving performances of ancient Greek drama in Modern Greek in Greece itself; she also discusses Annie Fields (partner of Sarah Orne Jewett).

Prins identifies common themes to the auto/biography of these women "doing" (or "knowing") Greek: an intense, eroticized desire for Greek as a girl, learning it sort of secondhand from brothers' or fathers' books/tutors, despairing at the difficulty of Greek, perhaps going to university (but often having a gap that wouldn't quite let them catch up, particularly earlier on in the Victorian period), fretting over how to translate, if it is possible at all, in some way inscribing "Greek letters" physically, perhaps with their own body (dance, etc.).

The book itself was super-interesting, but it fell, for what I was hoping for, too far to the literary theoretical side, where I wanted more social history. Still, I really enjoyed it, as it's a topic that is near and dear to my own heart. I really wanted much more discussion as well about the ways in which study of Greek was creating homosocial/homoerotic bonds between the women, not to mention the dawn of homosexuality itself; there's some thought about this in the book, but nowhere near enough for how important it clearly was.

[I also really wanted more info than the one throw-away reference to "lady's Greek without the accents" to know whether that was actually a thing -- were women really known for just leaving the accents off? Or making mistakes with them? The author picks that up as a metaphor throughout the book, but I wanted actual information.]