Marina Warner is such a widely celebrated writer that it is a source of some wonderment that this is the first full-length study of her work. Perhaps that is because she is so hard to characterize. For example, she is an English writer yet she has an international perspective on her country. Again, she is a novelist whose work is rooted in traditional forms such as legend, romance and fairy tale yet who is wholly contemporary in her thinking. Other paradoxes come to mind. While her numerous works of scholarship are taken seriously within the academy, she has resolutely remained an independent writer who only recently accepted an affiliation to a university. Again, her vision is secular, yet in both her critical and creative writing she returns again and again to the idea of the sacred or supernatural. Above all, she has an equally strong sense of myth and of history, their interaction being the basis of her fiction and the focus of her scholarship. In sum, she is a wonderfully ambitious and challenging writer whose contribution needs assessing, book by book - which is precisely what this pioneering Writers and their Work achieves.