Misplaced Pages

Caroline Furness Jayne
Portrait by William Merritt Chase
Born	Caroline Augusta Furness July 3, 1873
Died	June 23, 1909
Resting place	Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Occupation	Ethnologist
Spouse	Horace Jayne
Children	Horace H.F. Jayne Kate Furness Jayne
Relatives	Frank Furness (uncle) Horace Howard Furness (father) William Henry Furness III (brother)

Caroline Augusta Jayne (née Furness; July 3, 1873 – June 23, 1909) was an American ethnologist who published the first book on string figures in 1906 titled String Figures: A Study of Cat's Cradle in Many Lands.

Early life and education

Caroline Augusta Furness was born on July 3, 1873, the youngest of the four children and only daughter of Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness and author Helen Kate (Rogers) Furness. She grew up in the family's house in Washington Square in Philadelphia, and at Lindenshade, their summer house in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Agnes Irwin School.

Career

She became interested in string figures through her brother, William Henry Furness III's anthropology work with Alfred Haddon studying native cultures where string game figures were used.

Jayne was the first to create a popular study of string figures built on academic papers from journals such as The Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and other foreign language anthropological journals. She also personally recorded string figures from several native groups that were in attendance at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri.

Jayne published the first book on string figures in 1906 titled String Figures and How to Make Them. The book provided instructions on how to create 129 string figures that were identified by anthropologists studying traditional societies such as those in Congo-Kasai and the Caroline Islands.

The 1906 book review from the Journal of Education:

Whew! Five-dollar cat's-cradles! Several full-page pictures and 934 other illustrations of cat's-cradles and other string figures. One is appalled at any attempt at description of such a book, so simple and yet so complex, so slight in its purpose, so vast in its revelation, and when one has gone through these more than 400 pages and nearly a thousand pictures he learns that all of this is merely "an introduction," to a real study of string figures—games which are widespread among primitive peoples, and played by weaving on the hands a single loop of string in order to produce intricat patterns supposed to represent certain familiar objects. All that is known of cat's-cradle figures in all lands and times is here gathered together with numerous studies, historic and ingenious. While there is in this a purpose to inspire the collector's craze of cat's-cradle curiosities in all races and places, there is a higher purpose of interesting people in the fascination of these games that quicken intellectual activities along a different line from bridge whist, games in which young and old alike can participate.

Personal life, death and legacy

On October 10, 1894, she married Horace Jayne, a zoologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Together they had two children, Kate Furness Jayne (b. 1895) and Horace H. F. Jayne (b. 1898).

They built a house in Philadelphia at 19th & Delancey Streets, designed by her uncle, the architect Frank Furness, now known as the Horace Jayne House. They also built a summer house in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, "Sub Rosa" (again designed by her uncle), on the grounds of her father's summer house. Following Jayne's early death at age 36, her husband and children lived year-round at "Sub Rosa".

In her memory, her father commissioned a Tiffany window for the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. The window features a portrait of her holding a lily.

In 1910, her friend, the poet Florence Earle Coates, wrote a poem in her memory.

Her son, Horace H. F. Jayne, was the first curator of Chinese art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, worked as director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and as vice director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bibliography

• String Figures: A Study of Cat's Cradle in Many Lands, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1906

Gallery

• Jayne's childhood house in Washington Square, Philadelphia
• Horace Jayne, in 1899
• Horace Jayne House at 19th and Delancey Streets in Philadelphia
• The Jayne's summer home, "Sub Rosa" (c.1896) in Wallingford, Pennsylvania
• Caroline Furness Jayne tombstone in Laurel Hill Cemetery

See also

• List of string figures

Citations

1. Jordan, John Woolf (1914). A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania and Its People. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company. p. 631. Retrieved April 25, 2022.
2. Leonard, John William; Marquis, Albert Nelson (1908). Who's who in America. p. 986. Retrieved April 25, 2022.
3. Darsie, Richard (2005). String Games. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. p. 80. ISBN 0-8069-7735-3. Retrieved April 26, 2022.
4. Conklin, Edwin G. (1941). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society. p. 771. ISBN 9781422372227. Retrieved April 26, 2022.
5. Vandendriessche 2015, p. 6.
6. Williams, Talcott; Repplier, Agnes (1912). Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness - Our Great Shakspere Critic. Cleveland: Privately Printed. p. 15. Retrieved April 26, 2022.
7. Vandendriessche 2015, p. 75.
8. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. London: The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 1906. p. 142. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
9. Vandendriessche 2015, p. 86.
10. Boston University (April 12, 1906). Journal of Education, Volumes 63-64, p. 413. Boston University: School of Education.
11. "Horace Jayne," Who's Who in America (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Company, 1911), p. 1009.
12. Virkus, Frederick A. (1925). The Abridged Compendium of American Genealogy: First Families of America. Chicago: A.N. Marquis & Company. p. 89. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
13. ^ Winegrad, Dilys Pegler (1993). Through Time, Across Continents: A Hundred Years of Archelogy and Anthropology at The University Museum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. p. 98. ISBN 0-924171-16-2. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
14. Griscom, Richard. "H.H. Furness, Lindenshade, and Suborsa". griscom.info. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
15. Our Building. from First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia.
16. Coates, Florence Earle (1910). Lyrics of Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 111. Retrieved April 26, 2022.

Sources

• Vandendriessche, Eric (2015). String Figures as Mathematics? An Anthropological Approach to String Figure-Making in Oral Tradition Societies. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-11993-9.

External links

• Works by or about Caroline Furness Jayne at Wikisource

• Caroline Furness Jayne (1873-1909)

v t e String figures
Figures, series, & games	Cat's cradle List of string figures
Enthusiasts, collectors, and scholars	Julia Averkieva Camilla Gryski Kathleen Rishbeth International String Figure Association Caroline Furness Jayne Honor Maude Rivers & Haddon Mark Sherman
Other	Children's games Knitting Knot Twine Unknot

• 1873 births
• 1909 deaths
• 20th-century American women writers
• Agnes Irwin School alumni
• American anthropology writers
• American ethnologists
• Burials at Laurel Hill Cemetery (Philadelphia)
• Furness family
• String figures
• Women ethnologists
• Writers from Philadelphia