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 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.
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...
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...
Literary responses Christine Brooke-Rose
It bore an endorsement of CBR 's work by Marina Warner , who considered that she brilliantly fuses political engagement, Beckett ian rhythms and experimental language as well as form.
“Some Other Recommended Titles”. London Review of Books, p. 17.
Reviewing the novel for the...
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...
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...
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...
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, 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, p. xi - xxi.
xviii
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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.