Susan Freeman, writing for the Journal of Women's History, summarized the book as "a theoretical and provocative examination of female photographers and their subjects, mother-daughter relationships, pleasure, and same-sex sexuality".
[4] The Times Literary Supplement also found fault with Mavor's "single-minded" interpretations, and noted that the book "shows no interest in how Hawarden herself might have viewed her photography".
Barrie, Roland Barthes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicott, a "boyish" exploration of the work of the authors named in the title, was described by Grayson Perry in The Guardian as a "thrilling mix of philosophy, photography, biography and much more",[6] and by Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times as "a defense of adolescence".
[7] In 2012 Duke University Press published Mavor's book Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour, in which Mavor uses personal recollections to interpret the French post-war works of Roland Barthes, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais.
[8] Philip Hoare of Times Higher Education suggested that "it is easier to read Blue Mythologies as enhanced poetry, rather than prose", concluding that the book "succeeds in directing our eyes anew".
[15] Mavor created the film Fairy Tale Still Almost Blue, which was described in The Philadelphia Inquirer as "something akin to an all-female, fairy-tale version of Thomas Mann's dark novella Death in Venice".