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
Anthologization A. S. Byatt
In the same year as this collection, 1994, ASB contributed a story, The Great Green Worm translated from Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy , to Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment, edited by Marina Warner .
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
319
Cultural formation Mildred Cable
The issue of MC 's sexuality is discussed by Marina Warner in her introduction to The Gobi Desert, 1942. Lesbian, Warner writes, is the wrong label for the type that Mildred Cable and...
Cultural formation Sally Purcell
Although in her student days she practised witchy activities like casting spells, she was, says Marina Warner (the recipient of an unsuccessful spell to cure a painful unrequited love), a quietly practising Catholic most of...
Education Ali Smith
Of all the experiences in her university career, AS specifically names readings at Aberdeen by eminent Scottish writers Alasdair Gray , Jim Kelman , and Liz Lochhead as having the kind of vibrancy that splits...
Education Sally Purcell
Her editor Peter Jay notes that she herself always insisted on the spelling Mediaeval. While seriously involved in the university Poetry Society and beginning to write and publish, she also posed nude for a...
Family and Intimate relationships Leonora Carrington
At this time Ernst was leading member of the Surrealist movement and identified by André Breton as the most magnificently haunted brain of our times.
Warner, Marina, and Leonora Carrington. “Introduction”. Down Below, New York Review of Books, p. vii - xxxvii.
viii
He was also married. Twenty-six years younger than Ernst,...
Family and Intimate relationships Mildred Cable
MC had suffered a great disappointment in her personal life before she left England for China, in the ending of an attachment she had to someone who was also planning to work in the mission...
Friends, Associates Leonora Carrington
Between 1986 and 1988 LC met frequently with author Marina Warner . At the time, Warner was working on a script about the artist for a film that did not come to fruition but she...
Friends, Associates Sally Purcell
Her friends included many other writers: Marina Warner , Alasdair Clayre , Peter Levi , John Wain and his wife Eirian , and Simon King .
Warner, Marina, and Sally Purcell. “Preface”. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry, pp. 15-18.
16
Jay, Peter, and Sally Purcell. “Foreword and Note on the Text”. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry, pp. 19-24.
20
Literary responses Maureen Duffy
Lorna Sage wrote that the trilogy made MDthe city's self-appointed laureate.
Platt, Edward. “25 Years fighting for writers’ rights”. ALCS News, No. 21, pp. 4-5.
4
In 2004 Marina Warner , re-reading this book, paid tribute to MD because we all owe her: she inaugurated some of the...
Literary responses Naomi Alderman
The Power won the Bailey's prize for women's fiction, worth £30,000 and a considerable boost to sales.
Clark, Alex. “Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman”. theguardian.com.
Marina Warner picked this enthrallingly told Cassandra-like prophecy as her best holiday read for 2017.
Warner, Marina. “Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers—part two”. The Observer.
Literary responses Germaine Greer
In GG 's native Australia, which she visited for a publicity tour two years after The Female Eunuch appeared, she and her book ruffled many feathers. A planned television programme was abruptly cancelled, and...
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 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...

Timeline

11 October 1819: The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, owned...

Building item

11 October 1819

The Theatre Royal , Bury St Edmunds, owned by its architect, William Wilkins , opened as a state-of-the-art modern theatre.

1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...

Building item

1 January 1916

The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.

25 January 1952: An incident between the British army and...

National or international item

25 January 1952

An incident between the British army and Egyptian police on the Suez Canal led to riots in Cairo.

June 1972: Bombs dropped on a Vietnamese village called...

National or international item

June 1972

Bombs dropped on a Vietnamese village called Trang Bang killed or maimed a number of civilians. The episode was captured on film, famously including images of a young girl, Kim Phuc , running naked with...

: In London the Association for the Teaching...

Writing climate item

Autumn1984

In London the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures launched a literary magazine Wasafiri: the ATCAL Journal, edited by Susheila Nasta .

Texts

Warner, Marina, and Leonora Carrington. The Seventh Horse and Other Stories, Virago, 1989, p. n.p.
Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.
Warner, Marina. “Be My Baby”. Serious Hysterics, edited by Alison Fell, Serpent’s Tail, 1992, pp. 36-51.
Warner, Marina. “Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers—part two”. The Observer.
Warner, Marina. “Between the Colonist and the Creole: Family Bonds, Family Boundaries”. Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire, edited by Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford, Dangaroo Press, 1993, pp. 198-04.
Purcell, Sally, and Marina Warner. Collected Poems. Editor Jay, Peter, Anvil Press Poetry, 2002.
Warner, Marina. “Diary”. London Review of Books, Vol.
36
, No. 17, pp. 42-3.
Warner, Marina. “Diary”. London Review of Books, Vol.
39
, No. 22, pp. 37-9.
Carrington, Leonora, and Marina Warner. Down Below. New York Review of Books, 2017.
Warner, Marina. “Everybody’s Joan”. London Review of Books, Vol.
34
, No. 23, pp. 11-14.
Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Warner, Marina. Fly Away Home. Stories. Salt, 2015.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Chatto and Windus, 1994.
Warner, Marina. In a Dark Wood. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.
Warner, Marina. Indigo; or, Mapping the Waters. Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Warner, Marina. Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and its Costs. Chatto and Windus, 1989.
Warner, Marina. “Into Thin Air”. London Review of Books, pp. 14-16.
Warner, Marina et al. “Introduction”. The Gobi Desert, Beacon Press, 1987, p. xi - xxi.
Warner, Marina. “Introduction”. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter, Virago, 1993, p. ix - xvii.
Warner, Marina, and Leonora Carrington. “Introduction”. Down Below, New York Review of Books, 2017, p. vii - xxxvii.
Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.
Warner, Marina. L’Atalante. British Film Institute, 1993.
Warner, Marina. “Learning my Lesson”. London Review of Books, Vol.
37
, No. 6, pp. 8-14.
Warner, Marina. “Leto’s Flight”. Ovid Metamorphosed, edited by Philip Terry, Chatto and Windus, 2000, pp. 160-82.
Warner, Marina. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. Vintage, 1994.