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
Travel Mildred Cable
From their account of their travels in the Gobi, Marina Warner concludes that their religious attitudes were by now even more tolerant than at the time of their early dislike for the rigid denominationalism they...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michèle Roberts
She writes, I originally became interested in the subject when I was trying to think my way out of Catholicism and into the confidence necessary for beginning to write.
Roberts, Michèle. “God”. Mslexia, Vol.
21
, pp. 28-9.
28
She writes excitedly about her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Atwood
Subjects include English women writers Virginia Woolf , Antonia Fraser , Marina Warner , and Hilary Mantel , Americans Toni Morrison and Ursula Le Guin, as well as the reluctant Canadian Susanna Moodie and...
Textual Production Sally Purcell
Peter Jay edited and published the posthumous Collected Poems of SP , with a preface by Marina Warner .
“Bowker’s Global Books in Print”. globalbooksinprint.com.
Purcell, Sally, and Marina Warner. Collected Poems. Editor Jay, Peter, Anvil Press Poetry.
prelims
Textual Production Leonora Carrington
During the 1940s LC wrote two novellas, The Stone Door and Little Francis, both of which were shaped by her perceptions of her own life. Marina Warner considers the former a love story and...
Textual Production Leonora Carrington
The collection includes an introduction by Marina Warner , who worked with LC and Paul De Angelis on the integrity of the texts, which were first written between the late 1930s and early 1940s. Warner,...
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, 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, pp. 69-77.
72
Her two...
Textual Production Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria 's Sketchbook was published by Marina Warner in 1979.
Warner, Marina. Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook. Crown Publishers.
Textual Production Alison Fell
It was Marsha Rowe , a friend and contributor, who first suggested to her a book on hysterics.
Fell, Alison, editor. Serious Hysterics. Serpent’s Tail.
prelims
Other contributors included Marina Warner , Zoë Fairbairns , and Gail Scott .
Textual Production Jeanette Winterson
Her contributors included Ali Smith on Beethoven 's Fidelio, Anne Enright on Dvorak 's Rusalka, Jackie Kay on Janacek 's The Makropulos Case, Joanna Trollope on Donizetti 's L'Elisir d'Amore, Kate Atkinson
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...
Publishing Naomi Mitchison
The frontispiece and title-page have artwork by Gertrude Hermes .
Mitchison, Naomi. The Fourth Pig. Constable.
title-page
A new edition from Princeton University Press , 2014, has an introduction by another fairy-tale expert, Marina Warner .
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...
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...

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.