Publications: Non-fiction
Temporale (2023)
What happened to time during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns? Acclaimed novelist and essayist Marina Warner recounts how strangely her days and weeks passed, in this highly personal account of a response to lockdown in which she delves into her expe …
Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court (2022)
An illustrated exploration of Helen Chadwick’s erotic, playful, and fierce 1986 installation. In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954–1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exh …
C’era una volta: Piccola storia della fiaba (2021)
Published by Donzelli and translated by Bianca Lazzaro, Marina Warner’s ‘Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale’ (2014) is brought to an Italian audience. You can find out more and order a copy of the book on their website, here: https://www.d …
Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021)
First published by Harper Collins in the UK (now available in paperback), Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English …
Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018)
Published by Thames & Hudson, September 2018. Due in paperback March 2024. Inspiring and highly engaging, Forms of Enchantment unites the imaginations of artist, writer and reader, forging a reading experience which parallels the intrinsic pleasure …
Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction (2018)
From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins, to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children …
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014)
From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, …
Scheherazade’s Children. Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights (2013)
Edited By Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner NYU Press, Nov 2013 Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural e …
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2013)
Chatto & Windus (hardback) London 2011 Harvard University Press (hardback) USA 2012 Kalima (hardback) 2017, translated into Arabic by Abla Owdat A dazzling history of magical thinking, exploring the power of The Arabian Nights and its impact in the …
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors & Media (2006)
Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a l …
Signs and Wonders. Essays on Literature and Culture (2004)
Chatto & Windus (2003) Vintage Paperback (2004) This remarkable, resonant collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of her changing ideas on literature and culture – on fiction, drama, re …
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2002)
Oxford University Press. Hardback edition, 2002 Vintage. Paperback edition, 2004 Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay. In this book, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Wo …
No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998)
Vintage (paperback) UK, London, 1998 Chatto & Windus (hardback) UK Re-published as ‘MONSTERS OF OUR OWN MAKING – THE PECULIAR PLEASURE OF FEAR’ The University of Kentucky Press (paperback, 2007) Ogres, giants and bogeyman embody some of our deepest …
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994)
Vintage (paperback) London, 1994 Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (1995) UK Chatto & Windus (hardback) UK; Farrar, Straus & Giroux (hardback & paperback) US In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebr …
Managing Monsters: Six Myths of our Time (1994)
Re-published as ‘SIX MYTHS OF OUR TIME – THE 1994 REITH LECTURES’ Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (1995) CCV Digital (2010) Kindle Edition (2010) In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six …
L’Atalante (1993)
“L’Atalante” is the work of French director Jean Vigo. It is a study of romantic love, told in a style influenced by surrealism, but still Vigo’s own. This text is part of the “BFI Film Classics” series. Each volume in the series presents a personal co …
Into the dangerous world: Some Reflections on Childhood and its Costs (1989)
Using the method and approach of an anthropologist, Marina Warner describes the tribal behaviour of the new savages – British adults in the late Eighties – and the declining role played by children in this new society. Children are perceived as being d …
Maggi Hambling : Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours (1987)
Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985)
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981)
University of California Press (paperback) US Oxford University Press (Re-published Spring 2013) Marina Warner tells a fascinating story. She has examined the court documents from Joan of Arc’s 1431 Inquisition trial for heresy and woven together with …
The Crack in the Teacup: Britain in the Twentieth Century (1979)
In The Mirror of Britain Series Houghton Mifflin/Clarion Books; First Edition edition (1979) Andre Deutsch Ltd (1979)
Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook (1979)
Macmillan; 1979 First Edition (1979) Marina Warner’s narrative draws on contemporary accounts and Queen Victoria’s own journals to describe her private life and the part her painting and her subjects played in it. From the pictures and the text, the di …
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976)
Invocations to the Virgin Mary marked out the days of my childhood in bells; her feastdays gave a rhythm to the year; an eternal ideal of mortal beauty was fixed by the lineaments of her face, which gazed from every wall and niche. On February 2, the f …
The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980 (1972)
London, 1972 History Book Club; First American Edition edition (1972) Atheneum; 1st edition (1986) From 1861 to 1908 a woman, Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. Opportunistic, ruthless, mal …