Janet Case

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

Early life and education

Case was born in Hampstead, London, in 1863, to William Arthur Case and Sarah Wolridge Stansfeld; she was the youngest of their six daughters. She was educated at Heath Brow, a co-educational school in Hampstead, where she obtained a first in Part II of the tripos at a time when women were still denied a full degree from Cambridge; 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. she was the only woman to be a cast-member of the Greek Play until 1950. Her performances in the plays made such an impact that she featured, dressed in Greek costume, in two illustrations of the first issue of The Woman's World. 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."

Career

After leaving Cambridge, Case taught Classics from 1887 to 1896 at Maida Vale High School, as well as offering private tuition. 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. Her work on both the Prometheus Bound and Aeschylean plays more generally was connected to her social activism, as she saw potential for Prometheus to be seen as a revolutionary text, and also wrote a feminist analysis of women in Aeschylus. The Girton Review described her translation as "both scholarly and graceful", recognising both Case's expertise and her desire to make the text accessible to a wider audience.

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