Marina Warner explores the tradition of personifying liberty, justice, wisdom, charity, and other ideals and desiderata in the female form, and examines the tension between women's historic and symbolic roles. Drawing on the evidence of public art, especially sculpture, and painting, poetry, and classical mythology, she ranges over the allegorical presence of the woman in the Western tradition with a sharply observant eye and a piquant and engaging style.

Among Marina Warner's books are From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1995), Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1983), and Joan of Arc (California, 1999).

"A dazzling and invigorating book."—Guardian

"This is the fourth, the most ambitious, and the best of Marina Warner's studies of female symbolism. . . . [Her] range of reference is enormous."—Fiona MacCarthy, London Times

"One of the great merits of Monuments and Maidens is that it opens our eyes to the numbers of female figures that surround us, on stamps, on coins, standing guard over banks and courts of justice. "—Mary Warnock, Sunday Telegraph

"Feminist analysis has shown how female images in art and advertising reveal society's attitudes, conscious and unconscious, towards women. Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens provides a much-needed historical context for today's debates. "—Wendy Smith, Village Voice

"Why should Truth be a woman? or Nature? or Justice? or Liberty? Not, certainly, because women have been more free, just, truthful, nor even (though this has a double edge) more natural. Marina Warner sets out to breathe some life into the army of petrified personages that litters Western cityscapes."—Lorna Sage, Observer