Harrison was born in Yorkshire, England and first received tutelage under family governesses in subjects such as the many languages Harrison learned: initially German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, later expanded to about sixteen languages, including Russian. Harrison spent most of her professional life at Newnham, the progressive, recently established college for women at Cambridge. She knew Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater, and moved in the Bloomsbury group, with Virginia Woolf (who was one of Harrison's close friends and looked to her as a mentor), Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Roger Fry. With Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook, she was inspired to apply anthropology and ethnography to the study of classical art and ritual. Harrison and this later group of people have become