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Marina WarnerMarina Warner
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
Author statement |
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Biography
Novelist, critic and cultural historian Marina Warner was born in London on 9 November 1946 to an English father and an Italian mother. She was educated in Cairo, Brussels and England, and read French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Sussex.
She is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction, including critical studies, novels and children's books. She contributes essays, articles and reviews to newspapers, journals and artists' catalogues. Much of her writing is concerned with an analysis of the mythology, folklore and archetypes surrounding the feminine throughout history, as expressed in art, literary texts and fables. Her non-fiction includes Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), which won the Fawcett Book Prize, and From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994). In the preface, the author describes her book, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998) as 'a cultural exploration of fear, its vehicles, and its ambiguous charge of pleasure and pain'.
In 1987 she was invited to California to research fairy tales at the Getty Institute of Arts and Humanities (now Getty Research Institute), and in 1994 she became only the second woman to deliver the BBC's Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994), a critical analysis of the workings of myth in contemporary society, with emphasis on politics and entertainment.
Her fiction includes In a Dark Wood (1977), The Skating Party (1982) and The Lost Father (1988), an ironised romance about the dream of America in Southern Italy during the Fascist era, seen through the eyes of a young Englishwoman. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). Her 1992 novel Indigo reworks The Tempest to explore themes of colonialism, and she is the author of a collection of short stories, Mermaids in the Basement (1993). Her children's books include The Impossible Day (1981) and The Wobbly Tooth (1984). She wrote the libretti for The Legs of the Queen of Sheba (1991), a children's opera, produced by English National Opera, and for the opera In the House of Crossed Desires (1996) by the composer John Woolrich.
Marina Warner has served as a council member for Charter 88 (1990-8); as committee member of the London Library (1995-9); a member of the Committee of PEN (2001-); a member of the management committee for the National Council for One-Parent Families (1990-9); and a member of the Literature Panel at the Arts Council of England (1992-8). She is also a trustee of Artangel and of OpenDemocracy. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Exeter, York and St Andrews, as well as honorary doctorates from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of North London. Recent academic appointments include Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge; Mellon Professor at Pittsburgh University (1997); Visiting Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford; and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London. Marina Warner delivered the 2001 Clarendon Lectures entitled 'Fantastic Metamorphoses and other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self'. She was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2000.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1985 and an honorary fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Marina Warner lives in London. Her novel, The Leto Bundle (2001), explores the trials and struggles of a refugee, drawing on mythology, fairytale, medieval chronicles and contemporary events to examine issues of identity and exclusion, motherhood and survival. A new collection of short stories, Murderers I Have Known and Other Stories, and an examination of metamorphosis, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds were both published in 2002. Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture (2003), is a collection of writing spanning 25 years.
Her latest book is Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-first Century (2006), which explores the idea of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment. She is currently working on a book about magic and magicians, and a further novel.
Marina Warner was awarded a CBE in 2008.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Children, Criticism, Fiction, Libretto, Non-fiction, Short stories
Bibliography
The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz'u-his 1835-1908 Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976
In a Dark Wood Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977
Queen Victoria Sketch Book Macmillan, 1979
The Crack in the Tea-Cup: Britain in the 20th Century André Deutsch, 1979
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981
The Impossible Day Methuen, 1981
The Impossible Night Methuen, 1981
The Impossible Bath Methuen, 1982
The Impossible Rocket Methuen, 1982
The Skating Party Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982
The Wobbly Tooth André Deutsch, 1984
Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985
The Lost Father Chatto & Windus, 1988
Into the Dangerous World Chatto & Windus, 1989
Imagining a Democratic Culture Charter 88, 1991
Indigo Chatto & Windus, 1992
L'Atalante British Film Institute, 1993
Mermaids in the Basement Chatto & Windus, 1993
Richard Wentworth Thames & Hudson, 1993
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers Chatto & Windus, 1994
Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (Reith Lectures) Vintage, 1994
Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment (editor) Chatto & Windus, 1994
Donkey Business Donkey Work: Magic and Metamorphoses in Contemporary Opera University of Wales, 1996
The Inner Eye: Art beyond the Visible National Touring Exhibitions, 1996
No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock Chatto & Windus, 1998
The Leto Bundle Chatto & Windus, 2001
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds Oxford University Press, 2002
Murderers I Have Known and Other Stories Chatto & Windus, 2002
Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture Chatto & Windus, 2003
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century Oxford University Press, 2006
Prizes and awards
1986 Fawcett Society Book Prize Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
1988 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Lost Father
1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) The Lost Father
1989 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award The Lost Father
1999 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
2000 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
2000 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
2008 CBE
Critical Perspective
Marina Warner has been an influential figure in British feminist writing since the 1970s, as a novelist, critic, lecturer, and broadcaster, but pre-eminently a cultural historian. Her weighty cross-culture studies display a dazzling synthesis of scholarship in literature, art, religion, popular culture and folklore, alternating high-mindedness with a sense of fun. Her style has clarity and precision, incorporating as it does an ongoing argument about the social roles and evolving status of women over the ages. Taking as her broad theme 'the feminine' in myth and history, she sets out to deconstruct and explain the underlying meanings of female archetypes, from the Virgin Mary to Joan of Arc, St. Anne and the Queen of Sheba to 'Mother Goose'. She illustrates this by reference to religious iconography and paintings, but also female images in advertising, cartoons, pop music and film: she has a special fondness for Disney movies. Her reinterpretations of female myths and fairy tales in particular have been important to contemporary women's writing in Britain (alongside her friend Angela Carter), 'freeing up' the subject for a generation of writers, most notably Jeanette Winterson and Carol Ann Duffy. Warner's more recent work has evolved from the historical/mythic study of gender towards folklore in general, and she has enjoyed prestigious public platforms for her ideas, giving the 1994 Reith Lectures, 'Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time'. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998) continued her exploration of folklore, this time examining the multifarious expressions of fear throughout world cultures. Her 2001 Clarendon lectures at Oxford have just been published as Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds.
Warner began with a fascinating if conventional historical study, The Dragon Empress (1972), on the life and times of Tz'U-His, Empress Dowager of China - a contemporary and admirer of Queen Victoria - tracing her ruthless rise from minor concubine to absolute ruler of a vast feudal empire. With Alone of All her Sex: the Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) she found her true metier, looking at the mythology, symbolism, allegories and icons of 'the Christian mother goddess' across Catholic Europe. She focuses on the figure of Mary as archetype, the approved model of ideal womanhood: virgin, queen, bride, mother, and intercessor. The book starts significantly with her own experience at a convent boarding school: 'invocations to the Virgin Mary marked out the days of my childhood in bells; her feast-days gave a rhythm to the year...her face gazed from every wall and niche'. She argues persuasively about the Marian cult's influence over the centuries in fixing, for the satisfaction of the male Catholic hierarchy, the structure of society and women's roles within it. In her 1976 conclusion, she was optimistic that the Marian cult was fading away, but by the 1989 revised edition she thought that Mary would 'one day' become a goddess like Artemis. 'Meanwhile, Mary offers a field of language and a proving ground, where the essential struggle for sexual and personal identity continues to take place'.
In 1994 she edited a collection of French Wonder Tales, and that same year published what is probably her best-known study, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Her main thesis is that fairy tales are connected to the tradition of women storytellers, from prophesying enchantresses (the Sibyls, the Fates) to Old Wives and 'Mother Goose'. These are themselves part of a complex interweaving of social relationships, taboos, myths and jokes around women's roles. The introduction tells us that for her, as for many other women, such tales became part of the 'private world of growing up female' and that 'the matter of fairy tales reflects...lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women'. The first half of this lavishly illustrated book looks at storytelling and their tellers, detailing how tales reached their modern forms via eighteenth-nineteenth century collectors, mostly from French and German sources. The second half takes up some of the most familiar ones, focusing on those with 'family dramas at their heart', especially around sex, marriage fears and the care of children. She suggests some ingeniously hidden meanings: 'Rapunzel', for instance, concerns the control of female domestic labour, while wicked stepmothers or witches, and the painful rivalries in 'Cinderella' and 'Sleeping Beauty', reflects the insecure a social position of older women.
One of Warner's marginal notes in the book mentions her childhood fascination with a fairytale about a girl who determines to rescue her twelve brothers from the curse of early death or being turned into ravens. She remarks that 'I wrote a version of the story in (her growing up in provincial Southern Italy'. Warner the scholar does indeed intrude into her fictions (even more overtly, the story 'The Legs of the Queen of Sheba' tells us about images of Sheba in Christian sources and 'later Muslim embellishments'). Her novels are usually family dramas of an historical/mythic cast, re-working legends and shifting between ancient and modern eras. The Skating Party (1983), and The Lost Father which draws upon her own Italian mother's heritage, are probably the most absorbing. The latter depicts the experiences of women in pre-First World War Italy, through the fascist era to their later lives in America. Anna, a modern-day archivist in London, is also re-constructing the story of her grandfather Davide, a dying lawyer whose clandestine political activities take place amid the febrile atmosphere of Mussolini's Italy.
Both Indigo and her latest novel, The Leto Bundle (2001), include schematic maps of their imaginary territories, and a chronology of characters extending from ancient history to the present. Indigo is a complex fable of post-colonial history, taking off from Shakespeare's The Tempest; the arrival of English buccaneers on an imaginary Caribbean island ruled by the powerful witch Sycorax (mother of Caliban) has consequences for the descendants of her foundling daughter Ariel and Kit Everard in twentieth century London. Miranda and her daughter Xanthe move to New York then back to Kensington in the 1970s, and finally to a conflict-ridden Caribbean island holiday resort. The Leto Bundle is rather more reader-friendly. Its mythic elements include a talking she wolf and the time-travelling goddess Leto, and it takes us from Ancient Egypt to Victorian archaeologists to a present day of harassed staff at a London museum. A subplot concerns the never-consummated relationship between researcher Hortense and Kim, the charismatic leader of a protest movement (who may or may not be Leto's missing son). Leto and her daughter have become Asylum Seekers in present-day Britain, as the novel reaches an unexpected climax.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
Author statement
'I write to discover things: to learn how to think and to know what I feel. I puzzle out problems, some of them personal and some of them of larger scope, but still personal. The imagination interests me, its patterns and imagery, its silences and its shouts; I like to explore what gets into it and lodges there (hence my research into myths and fairy tales). Reading until the world disappears and is replaced by the making of the mind's eye gives me the greatest pleasure; when I write, I stumble after this experience. I also believe writing makes something happen, in spite of evidence to the contrary, so it's important to take part through words and pictures made of words and ideas made of both.'
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
Contact information
Related links
http:/ / www.marinawarner.com
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