Six Stories of Enchantment

Wonder Tales

A unique and delightful collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries, edited and with an introduction by Marina Warner.

Marina Warner has an international reputation as a critic, historian and novelist. Her non-fiction works include The Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman and Fantastic Metamorphoses, while her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Indigo and The Leto Bundle, and short story collections including Murderers I Have Known.

Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences. The stories are all in superb new translations by celebrated writers, including A. S. Byatt, Gilbert Adair and John Ashbery. With a brilliant intorduction by Marina Warner, recognised as one of our greatest experts on myth and fairy tale.

Essays on Literature and Culture

Signs & Wonders

'A dazzling performance. This hefty collection must confirm Warner's reputation as one of the finest literary and intellectual minds at work in Britain' Caryl Phillips

Marina Warner's essays and lectures reveal a consistently honest and agile mind preoccupied with the powerful controlling fictions of our lives

She's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Clever, witty, erudite and, above all, usefully explanatory, these signs and wonders are a literary cabinet of curiosities for our sadly desultory times

As a leading explorer of a largely unchartered territory, Marina Warner is an impressive, inspiring but never intimidating guide

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar

Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008. www.marinawarner.com

Since the early 1970s, Marina Warner has been one of the most challenging, subtle and profound commentators on the culture of past and present, unravelling our webs of images, ideas and beliefs, and making new and provocative connections. 
 
This resonant collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of her developing ideas. Whether writing on Vietnam, Mrs Thatcher, the dollar sign and the twin towers, Queen Elizabeth I and incest, weeping Madonnas, zombies or fairytales, Marian Warner displays a rare gift for blending historical and anthropological insights with deft and perceptive readings on individual works.

Murderers I Have Known

'The stories are all sharp and strange...[this is] a book about now written with a far-sighted and relentless intelligence' - Ali Smith, Guardian

Warner writes with the delicacy of a tightrope walker...the result is exhilarating

A fine sheen of intelligent humour...acute and alive

Reminiscent of AS Byatt's short stories, Marina Warner's tales glimmer with the cerebral pickings of a true culture vulture

Sparkles with her inimitable and sophisticated style. These tales, both crisp and lyrical, form a cosmopolitan mixture of art history, magic, fairytale and urban myth

Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear. 
 
In 'Natural Limits', a bereaved woman, contemplating the massacre of 11,000 virgins, comes to terms with the unimaginable. The title story and 'Canary' search for signs of evil or innocence written on the body. The 'Insomniac Princess' finds that unheard melodies are indeed sweeter; whereas other stories give voice to the traditionally voiceless - the artist's model and the film double. 
 
Here are fabulous images of saints and sinners, bats and nightingales, pink flesh and putrefaction in an electrifying new collection.

The Leto Bundle

'An extraordinary novel... Breathtaking in its scope andambition... An enthralling read' - Sunday Express

Stimulating... vivid... a fascinating debate about the nature of mythology

A compelling and erudite meditation on exiles, refugees, loss and the search for a home. A timely, ambitious and inventive novel, which blends a reflection on Europe's past and present traumas with rare story-telling verve

Warner brilliantly communicates the kaleidoscope of cultures, tribes and nationalities encountered by Leto on her epic journey. Driven by a mystery that keeps the reader guessing to the final pages... Beautifully written, the language rich and sensuous, with a seductive range of references... Tremendous fun

When a mummy in the Museum of Albion is unpacked it is found to contain a bundle of curious objects and documents which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto. 
 
On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away on a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a maid in a war-torn city. She loses her son but saves her daughter during a long siege. 
 
As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe and into the present day, Leto reappears in different guises. Eventually she becomes a servant to a rock singer, and begins to search for her son.

Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock

No Go the Bogeyman

'It is impossible not to be dazzled by the brilliance of Marina Warner... No Go the Bogeyman is delightful, enchanting, discursive, funny, erudite' - Guardian

A rich feast of a volume. No one knows more about the myths, tales and large dollops of art and culture which go into the shaping of our imagination

No Go the Bogeyman is a study of terror. It is not a book for the faint-hearted or the intellectually fragile... A fascinating and disturbing book

This is a writer with power to change your imagination... Startling and shocking and delightful, No Go the Bogeyman is a treasure trove of stories, an indispensible reference work, a compendium of cultural images

Warner is a wonderful storyteller... Her range of references is startling... but she keeps her head and treads nimbly through, following the thread of her argument... with humane learning, wit and ease

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic; her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008. www.marinawarner.com

Ogres, giants and bogeymen embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular storytelling in various media, from classic fairy tales such as 'Puss in Boots' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, and from Frankenstein to Men in Black. Following her brilliant study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, this rich, enthralling new book explores the ever-increasing presence of such figures of male terror, and the stratagems we invent to allay the monsters we conjure up.

The Lost Father

'An ambitious novel of rare imaginative power' - Independent 
 
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history... This is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books of female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation

Warner's language and pace astonish and reward. Her characters, male and female, elderly and children, strike again and again the unexpected true note, whether playing, grieving, lusting, skinning fowl for dinner or complaining about politics

The Lost Father has all the pleasure of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world... It is Warner's best novel so far

Marina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister... This is a moving book, and a very bookish one

Like Visconti's film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. 
 
According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother's background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the early 1920's. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

The Allegory of the Female Form

Monuments And Maidens

'A dazzling and invigorating book' - Guardian

A book to change the way we see the world, and the place of women in it

Even the most sceptical will be struck by the insights, and forced to think about the questions raised. They lead naturally into an exploration of the nature of the feminine itself

Marina Warner examines three very different 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. The latter is one of the most brilliant analyses in the book, displaying Warner's combination of wit and erudition at its most dazzling

An eye-opening and wonderfully readable study

'Why should Truth be a woman? Or Nature? Or Justice? Or Liberty? Not, certainly, because women have been more free, just, truthful, nor even (though this one has a double edge) more natural. Marina Warner sets out to breathe some life into the army of petrified personages that litters western cityscapes... As her book shows, these stony ladies can be persuaded to yield surprisingly interesting answers' - Lorna Sage, Observer 
 
An entertaining and enlightening book about the relationship between allegory and female form from one of the great feminists and cultural historians of our time, Marina Warner.

Managing Monsters

A seminal lecture series in which the brilliant Marina Warner relates concerns embedded in inherited myths to those that continue to haunt the cultural imagination.

It is impossible not to be dazzled by the brilliance of Marina Warner

This is a writer with power to change your imagination

In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six lectures, she takes areas of contemporary concern and relates them to stories from mythology and fairy tale which continue to grip the modern imagination. 
 
She analyses the fury about single mothers and the anxiety about masculinity in the light of ideals about male heroism and control; the current despair about children and the loss of childhood innocence; the changing attitude of myths about wild men and beasts and the undertow of racism which is expressed in myths about savages and cannibals. The last lecture, on home, brings the themes together to examine ideas about who we are and where we belong, with reference to the British nation and its way of telling its own history. 
 
Using a range of examples from video games to Turner's paintings, from popular films to Keats, Marina Warner interweaves her critique of fantasy, dream and prejudice.

Life and Times of Tz'u-hsi 1835-1908 Empress Dowager of China

The Dragon Empress

Marina Warner was born in London of an Italian mother and an English father. Her history and criticism has focused mainly on female symbolism - Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary; Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism; Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form - and is currently finishing a study of fairytale, called From The Beast to The Blonde. She has also written novels. The Lost Father was a Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and winner of the Macmillan Silver P.E.N Award. She has recently published The Mermaids in the Basement her first collection of short stories. 
 
She lives in London with her husband, the artist John Dewe Mathews, and one son.

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. Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. Marina Warner's biography lays bare 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 DRAGON EMPRESS also portrays a China in rapid decline as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty.

Indigo Or Mapping The Waters

A strikingly original interpretation of the historical and imaginative landscape of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Indigo explores the nature of power, the human cost of Empire and the theme of dislocation... Vivid, gripping, intelligent

Her prose has never been so lyrical, as she yokes Shakespearean references, colonial history and her own sensual experience of the Caribbean with a powerful feminine myth-making

Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. 
 
She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008.

Inspired by The Tempest, Indigo traces the scars of colonialism across continents, family blood-lines and three centuries. Rich, sensual and magical in its use of myths and fairytales Indigo explores the intertwined histories of the Everard family and the imaginary Caribbean island where Ariel, Caliban, and his mother, the healer and dyer of indigo, Sycorax once lived.

Marina Warner

Can itself evoke the sense of startled wonder that these tales first gave us

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar. This is a landmark book

Just like the tale-tellers she celebrates...she's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence is like a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Consistently enlightening...this is a brilliant work: wise, witty and as magisterially omniscient as any Sibylline oracle

Open the book at almost any page and you will find something to fascinate you

On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Entrancing, multi-layered and as wittily subversive as fairy tales themselves, this beautifully illustrated work explores and illuminates the unfolding history of famous fairy tales and the contexts in which they flourished. It also lifts the curtain on the tellers themselves - from ancient sibyls and old crones to the more modern Angela Carter and, of course, Walt Disney. A brilliant compendium of folklore, fairytales and learning which reveals unexpected links and histories behind some of our oldest and most-loved tales.

Marina Warner

Praise for From The Beast To The Blonde

Can itself evoke the sense of startled wonder that these tales first gave us

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar. This is a landmark book

Just like the tale-tellers she celebrates...she's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence is like a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Can itself evoke the sense of startled wonder that these tales first gave us

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar. This is a landmark book

Just like the tale-tellers she celebrates...she's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence is like a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Can itself evoke the sense of startled wonder that these tales first gave us

She is a terrific writer and an original scholar. This is a landmark book

Just like the tale-tellers she celebrates...she's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence is like a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings

Books by Marina Warner

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