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 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 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...
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 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 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...
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
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...
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,...
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...

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.