Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>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, the novelist Virginia Woolf, and the poet Hilda Doolittle, 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. These three women’s 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. These women not only reimagined the chorus from a feminist perspective but in turn were also themselves critical agents of its modernist reception, radically reshaping how their readers understood the Greek past.</jats:p>