Marina Warner
Marina Warner
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, DBE, FRSL, FBAis a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth9 November 1946
division emancipate feminists generation interested serious wear women
One of the achievements of our generation of feminists was to emancipate women from the division between being interested in clothes and appearance, and being serious and ambitious. I am of the first generation that could go to Biba, wear miniskirts and get a degree.
gentleman special world
The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.
beautiful book italian
I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well... English has fallen short.
photographer young bookworms
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
people cosmos culture
If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
done way different
True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.
romance erotic greek
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.
spring opposites desire
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
essence males female
The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
writing stories information
I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it's hardening a bit and I don't take the impression as well as I used to. Instead of writing in free flight, I had to check on the stories all the time. So I have decided I better to do it while I am fresh!
pain vocabulary pleasure
The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.
odds teeth fairy-tale
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.
media black phases
When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled...It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.
philosophy writing trying
I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.