Marina Warner is a renowned novelist and cultural critic. Her many books include Alone of All Her Sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary (1978) and Monuments and Maidens: allegory of the female form (1985). Her most recent novel is The Leto Bundle (2002), and she has co-curated the major exhibition on the theme of Metamorphosis at London’s Science Museum from October 2002.London

Recent articles

Is photography a threat to memory? Marina Warner on how images can dissolve rather than preserve the past.

Marina Warner writes from The Italian Academy at Edward Said’s own Columbia University, New York about a great public intellectual and a rare, true friend.

From pre-historic bog-people to ‘big hair’; virgin martyrs to dresses spun from lost souls, to the hairy Devil himself, the author of ‘The Beast to the Blonde’ takes us on a final grand tour of openDemocracy’s virtual museum.

The theme of ‘apology’ is in the air: governments are saying it to former colonial subjects, or to political prisoners in post-dictatorships; former terrorists to their targets; banks and businesses to looted or polluted clients; churches and cults to victims of abuse. Why are they doing it? In her approach to today’s latest ‘political enthusiasm’, we accompany Marina Warner – novelist, critic, and subversive anatomist of myth and the collective subconscious – on a sparkling tour of the literature of apology over twenty-five centuries. This article is the first in a series of six published on openDemocracy.

In which the archetypal figure of human heroic suffering meets the persecuted eternal feminine. Before history invented public apology, was there any solace?