English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer Dame Marina Sarah Warner, who was ratified as first female President of the Royal Society of Literature at the annual meeting on this day in 2017.
Marina Warner was born in London in 1946 to an English father and an Italian mother. “Marina was brought up initially in Cairo, where her father ran a bookshop, until it was set on fire during attacks on foreign businesses in January 1952, a precursor to the Egyptian revolution. The family then moved to Brussels and to Cambridge and Berkshire, England, where Marina studied at St Mary’s School, Ascot. She studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. While at Oxford she was the editor of The Isis magazine (published by Robert Maxwell).”
“Warner began her career as a staff writer for The Daily Telegraph, before working as Vogue‘s features editor from 1969 until 1972.”
“Her first book was The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835–1908 (1972), followed by the controversial Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), a provocative study of Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. These were followed by Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) and Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985). Warner’s novel The Lost Father was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1988. Her non-fiction book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers won a Mythopoeic Award in 1996. The companion study of the male terror figure (from ancient myth and folklore to modern obsessions), No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, was published in October 1998 and won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2000. Warner’s other novels include The Leto Bundle (2001) and Indigo (1992). Her book Phantasmagoria (2006) traces the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema.”
“In December 2012, she presented a programme on BBC Radio Four about the Brothers Grimm. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. In 1994 she became only the second woman to deliver the BBC’s Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time, in which she gave an analysis of the workings of myth in contemporary society, with emphasis on politics and entertainment.”
“She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to literature.”
“She was a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex from 2004 until her resignation in 2014. She took up a chair in English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, in September 2014. She is a quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2015. Warner was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to higher education and literary scholarship.”
“In 2015–16, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne’s College, Oxford, part of the Humanitas Programme.”
“In March 2017, Warner was elected as the 19th—and first female—president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), succeeding Colin Thubron in the post. On Warner’s retirement from the role at the end of 2021, Bernardine Evaristo became the new president, with Warner subsequently becoming RSL President Emerita.”
“In 2019, Warner chaired the judges of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.”
“She was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to the humanities.”
Non-whitewashed history together 