Once upon a time, in the Paris of Louis XIV, five ladies and one gentleman-- all of them aristocrats-- seized on the new enthusiasm for "Mother Goose Stories" and decided to write some of them down. Telling stories resourcefully and artfully was a key social grace, and when they recorded these elegant narratives they consciously invented the modern fairy tale as we still know it today.
For this beautiful anthology of six masterpiece wonder tales, Marina Warner gathered five writers with a special sympathy for the French stories they render here in burnished, cunning and amusing English....

Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

Joan has a unique role in Western imagination--she is one of the few true female heroes. Marina Warner uses her superb historical and literary skills to move beyond conventional biography and to capture the essence of Joan of Arc, both as she lived in her own time and as she has "grown" in the human imagination over the five centuries since her death. She has examined the court documents from Joan of Arc's 1431 Inquisition trial for heresy and woven the facts together with an analysis of the histories, biographies, plays, and paintings and sculptures that have appeared over time to honor this...

Marina Warner explores the tradition of personifying liberty, justice, wisdom, charity, and other ideals and desiderata in the female form, and examines the tension between women's historic and symbolic roles. Drawing on the evidence of public art, especially sculpture, and painting, poetry, and classical mythology, she ranges over the allegorical presence of the woman in the Western tradition with a sharply observant eye and a piquant and engaging style.

Is Jurassic Park a work of covert misogynist propaganda? Does romanticizing childhood lead to abusing children? What secret correspondence links Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to video games and Shakespeare's Caliban to Hannibal Lecter? in what ways do our culture's most hallowed legends inform the current debates over single mothers, the men's movement, and animal rights?
In these six dazzlingly intelligent and provocative essays, the distinguished English novelist and critic Marina Warner weaves classical mythology, pop culture, and today's headlines into a potent work of cultural...

Inspired by The Tempest, the novelist rewrites the drama of Ariel, Caliban and Sycorax in a Caribbean setting, exploring the colonial conflicts of an imaginary island and one family. The author's previous novel The Lost Father was Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

From 1861 to 1908 a woman - the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin - held the supreme power in China. Opportunist, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over 400 million people. This biography explores her complex personality - her extreme conventionalism, her hatred of foreigners, her passion for power and intrigue, her vanity and her delight in ritual, her extravagance and corruption, and her love of gardens, painting and the theatre. The book also portrays a China in rapid decline, as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of...

Marina Warner's 1994 Reith Lectures, in which she offered a definition of myth and its many contemporary faces, exploring the monster, children, mothers, strangers, and the idea of home.

This work examines three very different allegorical uses of the female form: New York's statue of Liberty; the public sculptures of central Paris; and the images of Mrs Thatcher favoured by Fleet Street.

Includes stories that conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear. This title includes images of saints and sinners, bats and nightingales, pink flesh and putrefaction in an electrifying collection.