Janet Elizabeth Case

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Janet Elizabeth Case (1863–1937) was a British classical scholar, tutor of ancient Greek, and women's rights advocate.

Early life and education[edit]

Case was born in Hampstead, London, in 1863, to William Arthur Case and Sarah Wolridge Stansfeld; she was the youngest of their six daughters.[1] She was educated at Heath Brow, a co-educational school in Hampstead,[1] and later studied classics at Girton College, Cambridge from 1881 to 1885,[2] where she obtained a first in Part II of the tripos at a time when women were still denied a full degree from Cambridge;[3] in 1907 she converted this to a Master of Arts when Trinity College, Dublin began to offer degrees to women who had qualified at Oxford and Cambridge.[1]

In 1884 Case co-founded Girton College's classical club; she was an active participant in Cambridge productions of ancient Greek drama, taking the role of Electra in a Girton college production of 1883, and Athena in Aeschylus' Eumenides in the Cambridge Greek Play of 1885.[1] She was the first female actor in the annual Cambridge Greek Play, an exception to the practice of using only male actors at that time;[4] she was the only woman to be a cast-member of the Greek Play until 1950.[5] In her obituary in The Times, Virginia Woolf would later describe Case as "a noble Athena, breaking down the tradition that only men acted in the Greek play."[6]

Career[edit]

After leaving Cambridge, Case taught Classics from 1887 to 1896 at Maida Vale High School, as well as offering private tuition.[1] While working as a tutor, she taught Greek to a young Virginia Woolf from 1902 to 1907. After this instruction ended, Case and Woolf developed a close friendship that would last until Case's death in 1937.[6] Woolf wrote Case's obituary, which was published in The Times on 22 July 1937.

Case published her translation of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in 1905.[7]

From 1925 to 1937 she wrote a weekly "Country Diaries" column for the Manchester Guardian, which was published as a collection in 1939.[8] Suffering from ill-health, she had given up teaching in 1915, aged 52; she died of cancer in 1937.[1]

Activism[edit]

Case became involved in the women's rights movement, thanks to her friend and former Girton classmate Margaret Llewelyn Davies, who served as general secretary of the Co-operative Women's Guild from 1899 to 1921. Case advised the Guild on divorce law reform, publishing a 1912 pamphlet summarising the royal commission's recommendations on divorce and advocating a proposal of the Guild that female assessors should be appointed to the divorce court.[1] Case also encouraged Virginia Woolf to become involved in the women's rights movement, writing to her in 1910 of the "wrongness of the present state of affairs."[9]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g "Case, Janet Elizabeth (1863–1937), classics teacher and journalist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/51784. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 22 January 2019. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ Sutherland, Gillian (2015). In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 62.
  3. ^ "At last, a degree of honour for 900 Cambridge women". The Independent. 31 May 1998. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
  4. ^ Easterling, Pat, 'The early years of the Cambridge Greek Play, 1882-1912', in Stray, Chris (1999, ed.), 27-47, pp. 29-30.
  5. ^ "Eumenides | The Cambridge Greek Play". www.cambridgegreekplay.com. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
  6. ^ a b Alley, Henry M. (1982). "A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf's 'Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.'" Twentieth Century Literature. 28:3.
  7. ^ Foster, Finley Melville Kendall (1918). English Translations from the Greek: A Bibliographical Survey, Volume 22. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 8.
  8. ^ Wainwright, Martin. “First Eleven,” The Guardian, 30 August 2008. Retrieved on 16 November 2017.
  9. ^ Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, eds. (1975). The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume I. New York: Harcourt. p. 421.
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