Internationally acclaimed author and scholar, Professor Marina Warner, delivered two lectures entitled “This is the very coinage of your brain: Phantoms and Illusions in Hamlet and other plays” and “Voices and Footfalls: Traces of the Feminine in fiction” at the Literature and Comparison Seminar Series organised by the British Council and the Faculty of Arts’ Department of English.

These two lectures related to Professor Warner’s writings on female archetypes in mythology, folklore and films, which analyse the female of the species throughout history, as expressed in art, literary texts and fables. Professor Warner has been an influential figure in British feminist writing since the 1970s, as a novelist, critic, lecturer and broadcaster, but is pre-eminently a cultural historian.

Her most popular work on feminism, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994), is an investigation of the female role in storytelling which ranges in its concerns from the classic prophetic fates to the “Mother Goose” tradition, as well as offering re-readings of popular stories such as Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty.

In one brief hour, Prof. Warner

covered various subjects such as

memories, feminine representations, rhythms and sounds in literature, holding the fascinated interest of the

audience made up of students, lecturers as well as lovers of literature. She exemplified her lecture with extracts from her book The Lost Father, which draws on her Italian mother’s heritage, and other readings. She mentioned diverse authors such as Borges to illustrate the fact that memories, myth and folklore in many countries are represented by a feminine figure, like for example the teaching of lullabies has always been regarded as being the female’s job. Underlining the

relations between texts and authors, she explained her obsessive interest in revisiting part of the past, re-working legends and shifting between ancient and modern eras. For her, the

voices from the past are haunting the present.

The lectures delivered by this prize-winning writer were very important for English Literature and Criticism students who attended the lectures. In fact, quite a few future lectures will be connected with this seminar.

For English literature student Rowena, the fact that gender was one of the main subjects covered was a good thing for students as it was only introduced last year at university. Prof. Warner also introduced students to unknown areas such as myth. According to Martha, another student, “she gave us a glimpse of various areas, subjects… that we didn’t really know much about before”.

The fact that Prof. Warner gave advice on how to write after reading samples of her work, underlined the lack of creative writing courses at university. Despite the wishes of many students, it is apparently a problem to set up a course specifically for budding writers.

Prof. Warner has been the most important foreign lecturer invited to lecture since the series of seminars started 18 months ago and students hope her visit will prompt other famous authors to come to Malta as well.