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
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...
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...
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
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 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...
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...
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 .
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 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...
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 .
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

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, 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, 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, p. 505.
Warner, Marina, editor. Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Chatto and Windus, 1994.
Warner, Marina. “Writers’ Rooms”. theguardian.com.