“Ladies’ Greek” describes a culture of female classical literacy that emerged during the formation of women’s colleges in nineteenth-century England and America. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a “dead” language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote “some Greek upon the margin—lady’s Greek, without the accents.” Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Through various modes of transcribing, translating, transforming, and performing Greek tragedy, these passionate amateurs played an important role in the history of classical reception and the popularization of classics.