Jane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to her death in 1928.

Robert Alexander Neil, who published as R. A. Neil, was a Scottish classical scholar. He lectured in classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was University Lecturer in Sanskrit. He was acknowledged as an authority on Greek literature and on comparative philology, and collaborated with scholars including Edward Byles Cowell and Jane Ellen Harrison, to whom he may have been engaged at the time of his death.