Caroline Furness Jayne


Caroline Augusta Furness Jayne was an American ethnologist. She wrote the best-known book on string figures, String Figures and How to Make Them: a study of cat's cradle in many lands, 1906.

Biography

Jayne was the youngest of the four children of Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness and author Helen Kate Furness. She grew up in the family's Philadelphia city house, facing Washington Square, and their summer house in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Agnes Irwin School. On October 10, 1894, she married Horace Jayne, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

String figures

Jayne's string figure mentor was Alfred Haddon, a Cambridge ethnologist who began the introduction to her book by noting that "in ethnology... nothing is too insignificant to receive attention". He then goes on to defend the research invested in the unpromising amusement of string figures. Jayne, an extensive traveler herself, was the first to create a popular study of string figures building on dry academic papers which had appeared in journals like The Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society as well as in a variety of foreign language anthropological journals. and include papers by Dr Haddon
:File:String Figures and How to Make Them.djvu|String Figures and How to Make Them was first published in 1906 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, and was reprinted by Dover Publications, New York in 1962 ; later reissues have ISBNs 0-613-81171-2 and 0-486-20152-X. It included figures illustrating every game and 16 portraits of players. Jayne's brother, ethnographer William Henry Furness III, provided some of the illustrations for the book.

Personal

The Jaynes had two children, Kate Furness Jayne and Horace H. F. Jayne.
They built a Philadelphia city house at 19th & Delancey Streets, designed by her uncle, the architect Frank Furness. They built a summer house in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, "Sub Rosa", 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.
Her friend, the poet Florence Earle Coates, wrote a poem in her memory.
Her son, Horace H. F. Jayne, became the first curator of Chinese art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and later was director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and vice director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.