As her controversial study of Mary is reissued, Marina Warner talks to Peter Stanford about the book’s hostile reception and the enduring cult of the Virgin
Marina Warner's seminal work on
the Virgin Mary is being reissued Photo: David
Rose
Marina Warner spent years unable to set foot in a Catholic church. “I went to
a convent school,” she explains, “but renounced it as a young woman. For a long
time it remained too painful. I felt flattened if I tried to go inside a church,
sinful, excluded and so wretched, but now all that turmoil has passed. And,” she
adds almost conspiratorially, “I find myself quite liking the serenity of it
again.”
We are sitting in the back row of Notre Dame de France, the church serving
London’s francophone community, tucked behind Leicester Square. The lunchtime
mass has just ended and a scattering of heads are spread out before us in the
pews, bowed in silent prayer, oblivious to our whispers.
The church boasts a fine collection of art including a chapel with line
drawings of the Annunciation, Crucifixion and Assumption by Jean Cocteau. I meet
Warner, 66-year-old novelist, academic, Reith Lecturer and mythographer, on the
eve of the reissue of two of her classic books, Joan of Arc: the Image of
Female Heroism and Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth & the Cult of the
Virgin Mary.
When it was first published in 1976, Alone of All Her Sex caused an
almighty storm, awarded haloes and horns in equal measure. For traditionally
minded Catholics, her deconstruction of the story that their Church had long
attached to Jesus’s mother, as a perpetual virgin, submissive, meek and finally
rewarded by being assumed body and soul into heaven, was a demolition. They
regarded it as an act of betrayal by one of their own. “It got so bad that my
Protestant father ended up writing to The Tablet [the Catholic weekly] to
stick up for me,” Warner recalls, sitting tall and upright, her long dark hair
pinned up on the back of her head.
Until then, books on Mary had tended to be written by priests – “mostly
Jesuits and very fine mystical studies, but not historical or analytical”.
Alone of All Her Sex was different. Warner took a feminist approach, much
in vogue at the time, as she describes in her new preface. And she certainly
stirred up debate.
Rest at The Telegraph
Rest at The Telegraph
