Modernist Women and the Greek Chorus

This book explores the engagement of women writers and intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century with Greek tragedy--especially its central and enigmatic feature, the chorus--and the ways it shaped their experimental scholarship, fiction, and verse.

The disappearance of the chorus after antiquity--along with its association with female marginality, lyricism, and ritual authority in the Athenian drama that preserved it--rendered it an enigmatic vestige of the Greek past that invited innovative receptions by women from the early twentieth century onward. This book traces a feminine, and feminist, genealogy of the chorus from archaic Greece to the 1930s, focusing on three anglophone women whose work was profoundly shaped by it: the classicist Jane Harrison (1850–1928), the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), known as H.D. All three women were drawn to the chorus as the most elusive and unknowable aspect of Greek drama, envisioning it as fundamentally feminine in origin and identifying with its marginality, lyric power, and ritual authority. As a literary anomaly with no modern parallel, the chorus, with its detachment from dramatic action, distinctive metrical form, and indeterminate language, offered an abstract medium through which to explore narrative fragmentation, temporal disjunctions, and polyphonic voice. Their pathbreaking work in the fields of classical scholarship, modernist fiction, and verse emerged in the wake of the nineteenth century, a period critical for the transmission and reception of Greek tragedy in Britain and the United States. Modernist Women and the Greek Chorus argues that these women not only reimagined the chorus from a feminist perspective, but in turn were themselves critical agents of its modernist reception, radically reshaping how their readers understood the Greek past. Their innovative scholarly and literary work further challenged traditional male academic Hellenism, which they viewed with skepticism, if not outright disdain, and opened the way for imaginative, feminist readings of Greek texts that ultimately expanded the field of classics beyond philology.