Marina Warner

Standard Name: Warner, Marina
Birth Name: Marina Sarah Warner
MW has produced countless articles, book introductions and reviews, twelve non-fictional monographs, two volumes of short stories, half-a dozen children's books, and five novels. She has also written books about artists, art exhibition catalogues, opera librettos, and screenplays for film and television. Her work is consistently framed by a cultural studies and historical perspective, and much of her fiction is inflected by myth or fairy tale. She has produced carefully researched, non-fiction studies of legendary or actual female icons such as the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, and scholarly explorations of public monuments, fairy stories, and monsters. Warner's novels portray relations between family members in crisis, set against a dense background of history and myth. Her books have been translated into many languages and have won her many awards.
Photograph of Marina Warner receiving the Holberg prize in 2015. She is wearing a patterned shirt, pink blazer, and necklace to match. Her hair is styled up, and she is smiling as she holds her framed prize certificate.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Judith Kazantzis
Ruth Fainlight praised the poet's ability to imagine herself into many roles, and Marina Warner wrote that Kazantzis had made of the well-known ordeals of Odysseus, both physical and mental or emotional, a vivid meditation...
Literary responses Deborah Levy
Marina Warner and others warmly praised Heresies: Eva and Moses. Two Plays.
“Deborah Levy”. British Council Literature.
Levy
DL 's father attended the opening of one of her plays in October this year with his future second wife (whom...
Literary responses Mildred Cable
Marina Warner , in her introduction to the Beacon/Virago edition, notes the foundational issues which MC omits to address, such as reasons behind Boxer xenophobia,
Warner, Marina et al. “Introduction”. The Gobi Desert, Beacon Press, 1987, p. xi - xxi.
xiv
or Christianity's subversion of Confucian ideals. She praises the...
Literary responses Mildred Cable
The book is, according to Marina Warner , written in the same simple, sickly, edifying style that is found in most works by Cable and French, except for their travel literature.
Warner, Marina et al. “Introduction”. The Gobi Desert, Beacon Press, 1987, p. xi - xxi.
xviii
Literary responses Gillian Slovo
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote that this novel had the pace of a thriller, not introspective yet raising compelling psychological and philosophical issues, and that its geography and history gave it the allegorical grandeur...
Literary responses Jean Rhys
Initial reviewers, for example Marina Warner , pointed out that the book was not a formal autobiography, but rather afforded glimpses of the real world of JR 's fictional heroines. Warner concurs with Rhys's opinion...
Literary responses Leonora Carrington
In her 2017 assessment Marina Warner likens the text, as a testament to the horrors of psychosis and convulsive drug therapy that is split between visionary illumination and profound psychological distress, to such writing as...
Material Conditions of Writing Angela Carter
She edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). She did the work for the second Virago collection while in hospital with cancer, and Marina Warner
Occupation Nina Bawden
NB sat on various literary committees: PEN International , the Society of Authors , and the Royal Society of Literature . She was president of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists , following in...
Occupation Leonora Carrington
LC continued her work as an artist and writer. Marina Warner identifies a shift in LC 's visual aesthetic in the early 1940s, with changes informed strongly by her experience viewing Hieronymus Bosch 's paintings...
politics Angela Carter
AC 's politics were those of the left, following the Labour convictions of her mother's family. During the 1960s she supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and went on several of its Easter marches to...
Publishing Naomi Mitchison
The frontispiece and title-page have artwork by Gertrude Hermes .
Mitchison, Naomi. The Fourth Pig. Constable, 1936.
title-page
A new edition from Princeton University Press , 2014, has an introduction by another fairy-tale expert, Marina Warner .
Textual Features Angela Carter
The action in the novel takes place over one day, in which the two elderly actresses Dora and Nora Chance (who are twin sisters) are celebrating their seventy-fifth birthday. They share their birthdate with their...
Textual Production Sally Purcell
Marina Warner mentions SP 's intense identification with the subjectivity of . . . Provençal song.
Warner, Marina, and Sally Purcell. “Preface”. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry, 2002, pp. 15-18.
16
Textual Production Angela Carter
In mid-career AC said she had worked mainly with women as her publishers' editors. Shared gender makes a difference in this relationship, she wrote, even if the reader has zero feminist consciousness.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 69-77.
72
Her two...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Warner, Marina. Marina Warner. http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html.
Dabydeen, David et al. “Marina Warner Interviewed by David Dabydeen”. Kunapipi, Vol.
14
, No. 2, Dangaroo Press, 1992, pp. 115-23.
Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. Chatto and Windus, 1998.
Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time. A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Warner, Marina. “Our Lady of the Counterculture”. London Review of Books, Vol.
34
, No. 21, pp. 9-11.
Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Warner, Marina, and Sally Purcell. “Preface”. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry, 2002, pp. 15-18.
Warner, Marina, and Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook. Macmillan, 1979.
Warner, Marina. Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook. Crown Publishers, 1979.
Warner, Marina, and Clare Boylan. “Rich Pickings”. The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored, Penguin, 1993, pp. 27-33.
Zabus, Chantal et al. “Spinning a Yarn with Marina Warner”. Kunapipi, Vol.
16
, No. 1, Dangaroo Press, 1994, pp. 519-29.
Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic. Vintage, Chatto and Windus, 2011.
Warner, Marina. The Crack in the Teacup: Britain in the 20th Century. A. Deutsch, 1979.
Warner, Marina. The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz`u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1908. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.
Cable, Mildred et al. The Gobi Desert. Beacon Press, 1987.
Warner, Marina. The Leto Bundle. Chatto and Windus, 2001.
Warner, Marina. The Lost Father. Chatto and Windus, 1988.
Warner, Marina. The Mermaids in the Basement. Chatto and Windus, 1993.
Warner, Marina. The Skating Party. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
Warner, Marina. “Those Brogues”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 19, pp. 29-32.
Warner, Marina. “Who’s sorry now?”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 5235, p. 10.
Warner, Marina. “Why I Write”. Kunapipi, Vol.
16
, No. 1, Dangaroo Press, Aarhus, Denmark, 1994, p. 505.
Warner, Marina, editor. Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Chatto and Windus, 1994.
Warner, Marina. “Writers’ Rooms”. theguardian.com.