1 - The Dragon Empress, Alone of All Her Sex and In a Dark Wood

Summary

Marina Warner describes herself as ‘novelist and mythographer’ (W 1). The description may not do justice to her range of work, as short-story writer, cultural commentator, literary critic, journalist, pamphleteer, editor and interpreter of fairy tales, children's writer, dramatist, librettist, curator of exhibitions, documenter of icons, and so forth. But the conjoined terms, ‘novelist and mythogapher’, will certainly suffice as a means of getting our bearings.

Consider, firstly, what is implicit in the second of them. A mythographer is someone who writes about mythology, in its various manifestations – which will include narrative, symbol, belief, practice. In order to do a thorough job, that writer will need a sound knowledge of history, for myths get made in time, by specific people in specific social contexts. Warner's mythography is especially impressive for its historical sense, which often leads her to original and incisive insights, as we shall see. But the implications of the term go deeper, for Warner's interest in history is twofold.

On the one hand, she cannot resist a fascinating fact. This is not a matter of pedantry: rather, she wishes to demonstrate the importance of empirical documentation so that the theory of myth does not become too abstract or universalizing, as in the ‘archetypal’ tendency to celebrate mythology as the transcendent expression of timeless truth. On the other hand, she insists that what we call ‘history’ is more than a sequence of events and ideas: it is at root a narrative, as we know from its etymology (Latin historia, ‘story’), and so overlaps with myth (Greek mythos, ‘story’). Imagination is the very stuff of history; we cannot understand ourselves or others without understanding the way we narrate our own and others’ lives. The emblematic detail, discovered by documentation, only becomes vital because of the capacity to make connections, establish bonds, which are more – but not less – than material evidence. History is the story we make out of that evidence.

Which brings us back to the first of those conjoined terms: Warner is proud to call herself a ‘novelist’. That is, she sees herself as a writer of fictions, an inventor of stories (Latin fictio, ‘imagined creation’).