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
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 Production Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria 's Sketchbook was published by Marina Warner in 1979.
Warner, Marina. Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook. Crown Publishers.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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 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...
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
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
Literary responses Sally Purcell
Marina Warner writes that Purcell's Robert Kirk magicks the mythical beast into being as a . . . Victorian naturalist's proof, while the poem itself is a fragment, hinting as a fossil does at the...
Literary responses Sally Purcell
Summing up her oeuvre a few years after her early death, Purcell's editor Peter Jay wrote of her questing vision, her psychological and spiritual accuracy, her attention to language, and her unique personal music...
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 .
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.