Essays: If ever there were a recipe for bitter feminist writing, this sounds like one: as a schoolgirl, Marina Warner was let down by a man, and the disappointment has informed her work as a novelist and cultural historian ever since. Belinda McKeon reviews Marina Warner's Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture.
But, as readers of her books on the cult of the Virgin Mary, on fairytales and on figures of fear will know, cliché, with its established patterns, is a safe harbour past which Warner sails with indifference; while her constant concern with the theme of the feminine places her firmly in the tradition of Greer and Millet, her fresh decoding and brisk self-questioning make for a voice all her own.
The double-crossing cad in question was St Paul, whose adventuring spirit and vivid missives stirred the imagination of the young Warner, transporting her beyond the polite confines of her English convent school, where she was required, as a girl, to sit still above all else; the disappointment came upon learning that it was the same inspirational saint who, with his dictum "Let women be silent", had engineered this repressive ethos of female etiquette. And the response, thus far, has been a career spanning three decades, several genres, and countless areas of inquiry, from Vietnam to Vogue, from medieval iconography to modern miracle-making, from Aesop to anorexia, from the scarf of St Cunera to the events of September 11th.
So widely, and so adroitly, has Warner spread her analytical nets that the time was ripe for her publishers to produce a collection like this, combining reportage and reviews with essays and obituaries to showcase the full versatility of her constantly grinding mind.
Jaded by experience at this stage, the reader of any text with feminist allegiances stands on guard somewhat, watching for signs of bias, for gratuitous claims, for the sort of obsessive analysis which has robbed the field of some of its credibility. There are moments in Warner's writing when that danger seems close at hand; a 1990 essay called 'Fighting Talk' veers near there, for example, with its argument that the language we use to describe pleasure - words such as "ravishing" and "stunning" - derives ultimately from a perspective on sexual experience which is rooted in violence, and thereby fundamentally male. Like the figure about whom she writes so memorably in her 2003 essay, 'The Sign of the Dollar' - Dante's Ulysses, who ignored warnings of his limitations by sailing past the pillars of Hercules - Warner sometimes seems, in her reflections on the social roles of women over the ages, to have crossed a certain line beyond which endeavours will not be taken entirely seriously.
Yet Warner redeems herself, again and again, just as did Ulysses, through determined striving in the pursuit of clearer knowledge. Symbols, such as the pillars, are what block such knowledge, so Warner pushes past them to tease particular stories from shared myths, and not uniquely female stories (and, in her reviews, to praise those do likewise) - the stories of her ancestors, of the 15th- century French feminist, Christine de Pizan, of the 17th-century Italian self-made saint, Maria Janis, of Queen Elizabeth, of Tituba, the witch of Salem, of Lewis Carroll's Alice, of the Shakespearean goddess of Ted Hughes.
A collection like this illustrates how Warner's approach has matured over the years; earlier, rawer outrage at the centuries of silence imposed upon women by religious and social forces is later outweighed by gripping interrogation of the many ways in which women contrived, regardless, to express themselves, from mysticism and madness to the might of the pen.
But Warner shows, too, how much of the language we use to evaluate speech has its roots in the Christian silencing of women. (Incidentally, her investigations into etymology and narrative suggest similar roots for Heidegger's thinking on authenticity - the contrast between valid discourse and the "idle chatter" of the fallen state of being.) But the idea of one valid language, Warner argues in a paper in the wake of September 11th, "represents a tyrant's first move", and to know more than one language, or more than one way of utilising a single language, is to think outwards, to enrich experience; to achieve a certain transcendence - of gender, of nationality, of sexuality. And whether the tyrant be monoglot globalism or Marian repression, the victim Warner seeks to liberate, by taking hold of language and re-imagining its shape, its boundaries, is the life of the mind.
Crucial to such liberation is the constant process of re-interpretation, of revising accepted ideas. Her writing excels because she is willing to accept that the unacceptable has been written, has taken place, and continues to take place. What she will not accept is the idea that the stories which tell of these things must remain as they are. Rather, they exist to be retold, to yield understanding, and to give shape to a different future.
"One must stand in the present," she writes. "It's a question of remembering, of having the voices behind one but keeping one's face to the times."
In her focus, and in her vigilance to those voices, Warner may be sitting still, then. But in her determination to make them heard, she is ever on the move.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture. By Marina Warner
Chatto & Windus, 516pp, £20