Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This brilliant and timely study looks beyond the Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, to the tellers of the tales, and to the social and cutural contexts in which the tales are told and re-told through the centuries, from the ancient sibyls to the eighteenth-century SALONIERES, from Angela Carter to Disney. The value and enduring popularity of folk and fairy tales derives not only from their mythic significance but, crucially, from the fact that their concerns are rooted in the material world. Lively, provocative and ground-breaking, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE is Marina Warner's first major work of non-fiction since the acclaimed MONUMENTS AND MAIDENS.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this scholarly, original, and insightful study, Warner (Alone of Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1983) explores the relationship between fairy tales and their historical and social contexts. She persuasively demonstrates that the teller of the tale-whether a prophesying enchantress luring knights to their doom or the jolly old beldame, Mother Goose-inevitably reflects the prevailing social prejudices for and against women. Warner first traces the "layered character of the traditional narrator" and the interconnections between storytellers and heterodox forms of knowledge. In the second half of the book, Warner takes up a sampling of tales and demonstrates in them such adult themes as the presense of painful rivalry and hatred between women (Cinderella). Finally, she explores the association of blondeness in the heroine with preciousness and desirability. Highly recommended for all readers who wish a deeper understanding of the fairy tales and cultural icons that have shaped us.-Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch. of Mathematics & Science, Mobile (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Notwithstanding the prominence of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault, most narrators of fairy tales, asserts Warner, have been women‘nannies, grannies, 18th-century literary ladies, sibyls of antiquity. In this richly illustrated, erudite, digressive feminist study, cultural historian Warner (Alone of All Her Sex) argues that instead of seeking psychoanalytic meanings in fairy tales, we must first understand them in their social and emotional context. In her analysis, ``Bluebeard'' and ``Beauty and the Beast'' reflect girls' realistic fears of marrige in an era when women married young, had multiple children and often died in childbirth. Her delightfully subversive inquiry profiles reluctant brides, silent daughters, crones, witches, fates, muses, sirens, Saint Anne (image of the old wise woman), the biblical Queen of Sheba and Saint Uncumber, who grew a beard to avoid marriage but was crucified for her rebellion. Angela Carter's fiction, surrealist Leonora Carrington's comic fairy tales, Walt Disney movies and French aristocratic fairy tales of veiled protofeminist protest by Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy provide grist for her mill. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Fabulous erudition marks this intricate study of the classic tales of wonder. Novelist and scholar Warner (Indigo, 1992; Monuments and Maidens, 1985; etc.) avows her sympathy for the fairy tales and tale-tellers on whom she focuses her keen feminist lens. Warner begins by arguing for the centrality to European fairy-tale culture, since ancient times, of old women, both as the oral historians who have passed it on and as key characters in its iconography. Reviled by some, the crones whom Warner spotlights nevertheless appear in formidable guises. Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, turns out to be the patron saint of gossips; her attributes survive in fairy tale figures (e.g., fairy godmothers). In a tour de force of scholarly speculation, Warner links the Queen of Sheba, whose riddles were the stuff of legend and who was known for her singular deformity of a webbed foot, to Mother Goose herself. Thus reweaving our understanding of the cultural unconscious, Warner draws on psychoanalysis, on philology, and on a trenchant feminism. While some connections seem stretched, for the most part these threads blend smoothly. The second part of Warner's book analyzes the tales themselves. ""Bluebeard,"" ""Beauty and the Beast,"" and ""Donkeyskin,"" a little-discussed tale of a girl's escape from incest, are the central exhibits. Occasionally Warner lapses into selfindulgence, as in a reverie on the blue of Bluebeard's beard (""the marvellous . . . rare steak . . . melancholy . . . orgone energy""). But her genuine originality shows in her ability to wring fresh psychoanalytic insight out of texts that have been in intensive analysis for decades. The discussion of feet developed in passages on the Queen of Sheba, for example, casts new light on Cinderella's glass slipper; the golden hair and archetypal beasts named in the title are illuminated in similarly provocative ways. One factor contributing to this originality is Warner's astute readings of artworks throughout this sumptuously illustrated book. Marvelously energetic cultural criticism. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic; her fiction includes Indigo ,The Lost Father (awarded a Common-wealth Writers' Prize), a collection of stories, The Mermaids in the Basement, and, more recently The Leto Bundle. Among her acclaimed works on myth, symbolism and fairy tales are Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens (winner of the Fawcett Prize) and No Go the Bogeyman- Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Winner of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award). She has edited Wonder Tales , six French fairy stories, and in 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC radio, Managing Monsters- Six Myths of Our Time.

Marina Warner is currently a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.