Marina Warner

Marina Warner is an internationally renowned cultural historian whose ambitious works of popular scholarship, from Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) to Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011), have been highly acclaimed and influential.

Their intellectual sweep across world cultures, religion and art in all its forms has transformed our understanding of myths, fairy tales, folklore and symbolism, revealing their often hidden meanings and social purposes – particularly as reflected in the lives of women down the ages. Her books make a stream of observations, from Renaissance painters and modern artists, The Bible, contemporary writers, to films, sculptures, tale-tellers and many other commentators, disclosing surprising connections and preoccupations. They are always lengthy, lavishly illustrated, and a pleasure to read or just dip into. More modestly but in a similar cross-cultural manner, Warner’s fiction moves easily between mythic encounters and modern settings, whether in London or around the world.Warner’s writings began with The Dragon Empress (1972), a biography of Tz’U-hsi, the Empress Dowager of China who was a contemporary and admirer of Queen Victoria. She found her true metier with Alone of All Her Sex, a study of the mythology, icons and stories surrounding ‘the Christian mother goddess’. It begins with her own experiences at a Catholic convent school: ‘invocations to the Virgin Mary marked out the days of my childhood in bells; her feast-days gave a rhythm to the year … [and] her face gazed out from every wall and niche’. Mary is considered as the archetype of ideal womanhood – for the male Catholic hierarchy – as virgin, queen, mother and intercessor, determining women’s permitted roles in society. In 1976 Warner was optimistic that ‘the Marian cult’ was fading away but later expressed the view that ‘Mary offers a field of language and a proving ground, where the essential struggle for sexual and personal identity continues to take place’ (revised edition, 1989).The latter statement strikes a feminist note, and Warner’s analysis of women’s struggle for sexual and personal identity found its ideal subject in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994). This wonderfully rich account argues that fairy tales – Charles Perrault’s 17th century collections to the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson – derive from age-old traditions of women’s storytelling and prophecy, as with the Sibyls, the Fates, to Old Wives’ Tales. Further, that the stories themselves are a complex interweaving of social roles, taboos, myths and jokes around women’s lived experience and family dramas. ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, for instance, reflect upon female domestic labour and the insecure positions of older women. Sexual metaphors also loom large, in images of devouring by beasts, bloody toes forced into ill-fitting shoes, and glass slippers. Warner pays tribute to her friend Angela Carter, the doyenne of contemporary fairy tale fiction, as ‘a fantasist with a salty turn of mind, a dissident with a utopian vision of possibiities’.‘When women tell fairy stories, they also undertake this central narrative concern of the genre – they contest fear; they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it’. This leads on to No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), which ‘began with the problem of men’ and moves towards ‘a cultural exploration of fear, its vehicles, and its ambiguous charge of pleasure and pain’. Her survey of monsters in stories, art, and especially movies includes French ogre Le Grand Lustucru, Hannibal Lecter (‘devouring of meat figures erotic appetite’), the ‘psychical perversities’ of Hitchcock’s killers, and Goya’s pictures of Kronos/Saturn devouring his children. We encounter Mr Punch, Roald Dahl’s giants, Raymond Briggs’ comical Fungus the Bogeyman, and King Kong who ‘changes scale phantasmagorically in the course of the film, all the better to penetrate the innermost corners of the mind’. Her explanations consult the best authorities: Freud, Helene Cixous and Angela Carter.Warner’s own fictions are far from psychological shockers or blood-stained narratives, but they do show her interests in tales, myths and families. The 1988 novel The Lost Father, for instance, incorporates the fairy tale of a girl whose brothers are turned into ravens, giving it as the fantasy of Rosa, growing up in Southern Italy. It’s a then-and-now story of Anna the archivist reconstructing the lives of her ancestors during the Mussolini era. Indigo (1992) is a complex reworking of The Tempest on a Caribbean island, moving to New York and London. The Leto Bundle (2001) features a time-travelling goddess and talking she-wolf, Ancient Egypt, Victorian era archaeology and staff at a present day London museum. Leto and her daughter become Asylum Seekers, while researcher Hortense is involved with charismatic protest leader Kim.Phantasmagoria (2006), subtitled ‘Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century’, is about ideas of the soul, the supernatural and spiritualism, especially ‘the language of spirit which remains dynamic in our culture’. Once again, she begins with Catholicism, its beliefs and ‘magic rites’: Warner relates her fascination with finding a shrine in Bologna, the mummifed body of a 15th-century nun. The study proceeds to death masks (‘a psychological precursor of photography’) and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks: she ‘continued to receive heads straight from the guillotine’. Dolls, fairies, mirages, magic lantern shows, painted panoramas and Victorian photography of children; all these phenomena have contributed to our sense of the uncanny, she argues. Particularly fascinating is her account of 19-20th-century spiritualism, which ‘gave women equality and opportunity, even special value’, its experiments, seances, and Psychic Photographers whose chief clients, inevitably, were the bereaved.The legendary tales of ‘The Arabian Nights’, called ‘a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales’ provides the subject of her latest book, Stranger Magic. The archetypal story is Shahrazad spinning tales to save her life, the grand sweep of Warner’s interpretation interspersed by many other tales, alongside responses to them by Western authors, from Voltaire and Goethe to Sir Richard Burton (who added sex), Flaubert and Wilde, Latin American authors also responded to them, such as Marquez and Borges: and Hollywood movies have adapted the tales in their own ways. Marina Warner can be thought of as something of a genie herself; she takes readers along with her on a magic carpet of explanation, shows some surprising and even alarming sights, always bringing us back enlightened from the spectacular journey.   Dr Jules Smith, 2012

'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.'