Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 1985
The Passion, 1987
Sexing the Cherry, 1989
Written on the Body, 1993
Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd, 1994
Gut Symmetries, 1997
The PowerBook, 2000
Lighthousekeeping, 2004
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Hercules, 2005
The Stone Gods, 2007
Other literary forms
Jeanette Winterson has dramatized several of her own books, most notably Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) for British television. She has written original radio drama and worked on a documentary, Great Moments in Aviation (1994), also for British television. She has written short stories, essays, and columns for The Guardian and The Times.
One of her earlier books was a comic book, and she has published several works of chil-
dren’s fiction, including The King of Capri (2003) and Tanglewreck (2006).
Achievements
Jeanette Winterson has been in the public eye from the time her first novel won the
Whitbread Prize. She was named by Granta magazine one of the twenty best young British writers. Other prizes include the Prix d’Argent at the Cannes Film Festival, the Prix Italia, and the BAFTA Best Drama Award for her television adaptation of Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit. She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for The Passion and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Sexing the Cherry. In 2006, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature. Her books have been translated into more than one dozen languages.
Biography
Jeanette Winterson was born in 1959 in Manchester, in the northwest of England, and
adopted by a childless Pentecostal couple from Accrington, a mill town just outside Man-
chester. She was raised under strict religious principles and shaped for a career as a missionary. By the age of eight, she was preaching at evangelist tent meetings held by the fam-262
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ily’s small chapel, and was making converts. Her reading material at home was limited to the Bible and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), a strange combination from which she developed a strong feeling for literary style.
At the age of fifteen, Winterson had a lesbian relationship with one of her converts that was strongly denounced by the church. At the age of sixteen, she decided to leave home
and took a number of part-time jobs to pay for the academic high school where she was enrolled. When she was eighteen years old, she enrolled at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, to major in English. She worked for one year at a mental hospital to pay tuition.
After graduation in 1981, Winterson worked in various theaters and began writing
what would become her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. She finished the novel at the young age of twenty-three years. After it was published in 1985, she began
working as an assistant editor for Pandora Press (her early publisher). She began a romantic relationship with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent. In 1987, Winterson published her second novel, The Passion. Its successful reception by readers and critics inspired her to become a full-time writer. The next year she entered a long-term relationship with Peggy Reynolds, an academic and a radio broadcaster. The following year, Winterson published
Sexing the Cherry.
In 1990, Winterson adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for television in a highly acclaimed dramatization. Her work was embraced in the American market with Written
on the Body in 1993, ensuring a worldwide readership. Honors and prizes followed, and she became a regular columnist, essayist, writer of children’s fiction, and broadcaster. She also bought a delicatessen in central London and a house in Gloucestershire.
Analysis
Jeanette Winterson’s novels are at the cusp of modernism, postmodernism, and Magi-
cal Realism. Her sheer verbal skills, so evident in her fiction, led to the novels’ initial popularity. The novels also were popular because they filled the desire in the mid-1980’s for a new lesbian narrative subgenre. In some ways, Winterson steered the postfeminist novel
into uncharted territories, especially in terms of narrative. She made gender, along with plot, history, and even narrator, sources of uncertainty. The one certainty in her novels is the story of the truth of love. Other consistent themes include myth and the fairy tale.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an immediate popular success, is an autobiographical story of lesbian sexuality. The heroine, simply called Jeanette (and later Jess), relates her experiences with a narrow-minded religious sect. With this novel, Winterson joined a long line of writers who were liberated from narrow religious upbringings. (D. H. Lawrence is perhaps the most obvious and most acknowledged of these writers.)
Winterson inherited far more from her religious upbringing than she rejected. She ad-
mitted that her readings as a child, narrow and limited as they were, led to her love of words and her sense of style. She became an evangelist, not for religion but for the books themselves, much like the “religion of literature” that the poet Matthew Arnold sought to 263
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construct out of the ruins of his childhood faith. Winterson has said that literature, and specifically postmodernist literature, has to redefine the boundaries of truth in terms of love and do so beyond the norms of common sense. As in Lawrence, that love has to be defined
in terms of sexuality and passion.
Winterson’s next two novels, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, play with history, with The Passion set in the Napoleonic era. Her fourth novel, Written on the Body, is a more somber exploration of what became her typical plot structure, the love triangle of a married couple and a single woman, usually lesbian. Love is challenged by disease, as the heroine is diagnosed with cancer. Love and disease break down boundaries, demanding
new ones be constructed. The novel has no plot line and the narrator is not clearly
gendered. Art and Lies and Gut Symmetries are similarly constructed.
After publishing the novels The Power Book and Lighthousekeeping, Winterson turned to children’s science fiction. By invitation of a small Scottish press, she turned to pure myth in the novel Weight, which is a retelling of the story of Atlas and Hercules. A growing concern with ecological issues led to the novel The Stone Gods, set partly in space in the science fiction format and partly on Easter Island, which suffered desertifica-tion at the hands of humans.
Sexing the Cherry
Sexing the Cherry is an experiment in postmodern fiction, interweaving strands of history, myth, fairy tale, and Magical Realism. The main plot concerns an orphan named Jor-
dan and his adoptive mother, a large Rabelaisian earth-mother type of woman who lives
by the river Thames in London. The time is the seventeenth century, and London is in the throes of civil war. Winterson shows herself with this novel to be deeply reactionary in her politics, siding with King Charles against the Puritans. The tale’s search, as it develops, is both for new fruit for Jordan and for love and identity, which includes gender identity, for his mother. A banana comes to symbolize the phallus, and Jordan’s mother literally bites off a penis as one would bite off part of a banana. The London portrayed is gross, sordid, and decaying, yet the mythic elements, the search for Fortunata the dancer in particular, prioritize the spiritual. The novel is a bold experiment, and it is left to readers to piece together the fragments.
The Power Book
Winterson considers The Power Book the last of a seven-novel cycle of long fiction.
The work is another conscious effort to rewrite the English novel on postmodern terms,
this time using the metaphor of the computer and, as one of its loci, cyberspace
. In The Power Book, word processors are shown to erase what one has written and rewrite what one has erased. Networks are shown to help one find parallel information to the story one is working on, but the information comes in fragments. Nothing is whole or finished.
This process of writing becomes a metaphor for individual lives. Winterson’s life is
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consciously “queer,” a term she prefers to lesbian. Queer suggests strange, not straightforward, and it also suggests the ambiguity of the phallus. The novel’s opening motif is the tulip, which is used as a phallus for the female body to become male. The consciousness of the presence or absence of the phallus in terms of connection and identity runs throughout the book. The novel’s subtexts include the story of gender change and ambiguity in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928). The story’s themes are the lifelong search for the grand passion, whether for love or tulips, and how humans keep reinventing themselves to find that grand passion; in finding it, one finds one’s true identity.
The main plot, such as it is, centers on two lesbian lovers (one of them married) as they meet in Paris and then continue to Capri. In the second half of the book, Winterson introduces autobiographical fragments from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. A mother tells her adopted orphan daughter that treasure exists out there in the world, if only one
searches for it and even if one has to begin that search in muck and filth. This determination to find the treasure through layers of time and meaning, symbolized by the Thames
and London archaeology (as in Sexing the Cherry), leads to the realization that the treasure lies within.
Lighthousekeeping
By Winterson’s own admission, Lighthousekeeping uses the remnants of her autobiography that are not resolved in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Silver, the narrator of Lighthousekeeping, is an illegitimate orphan girl who finds a home in the Cape Wrath lighthouse in the far north of Scotland, where several different seas meet, setting up dangerous currents. The lighthouse keeper, the blind man Pew, teaches her to tell stories, and local history is constructed as narrative. The novel interweaves several stories toward a personal resolution for Silver as she seeks her identity.
The main story weaves around Babel Dark, a Victorian clergyman who was a minister
in the local village of Salts and who knew Charles Darwin and the writer Robert Louis
Stevenson. Dark lives a double life and is portrayed as the inspiration for Stevenson’s classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which forms one of the novel’s subtexts. Dark’s own life reverses the Jekyll and Hyde scenario, in that the respectable minister suppresses the former fashionable son of a Bristol merchant who had a pas-
sionate affair with Molly, a shop assistant. Dark has escaped the affair by retreating to the north of Scotland and living almost a dead man’s life, suppressing all emotion. However, he kept two diaries, one respectable and the other wild and passionate, revealing his inner turmoil. Molly reappears twice to offer Dark a second chance, but he refuses, compromis-ing by going to live with her in Bristol for two months under the alias Lux (or light). In the end, he commits suicide. One of Pew’s ancestors, also a lighthouse keeper, recounts
Dark’s confession.
Dark represents some of the emotional suppression of Winterson’s own upbringing. In
the other main story, Silver has to find her own identity, especially when the lighthouse is 265
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automated and Pew and she are out of a job. She goes to Bristol to seek out some of Dark’s roots, then undergoes a number of encounters, some of which seem quite autobiographical. She takes a trip to Capri, where she steals a parrot because the parrot can say “Silver,”
representing the one thing that knows her name and, therefore, her. Eventually, she has a lover and then resolves to return to the lighthouse, say farewell, and realize the strength of love and the choice for passion which must be made to continue living.
David Barratt
Other major works
short fiction: The World and Other Places, 1998.
play: The Power Book, pr. 2002 (based on her novel).
teleplays: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 1990 (based on her novel); Great Moments in Aviation (1994).
radio plays: Static, 1988; Text Message, 2001.
nonfiction: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, 1995.
children’s literature: The King of Capri, 2003; Tanglewreck, 2006.
edited text: Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction with a Twist, 1986.
Bibliography
Andermahr, Sonya. Jeanette Winterson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Late biography of Winterson by a scholar of her work. Places her fiction in historical, critical, and theoretical context and analyzes her experimentation with technique and form.
_______, ed. Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Harrisburg, Pa.: Continuum International, 2007. Collection of scholarly essays covering the key themes
and styles in Winterson’s fiction.
Lopez, Gemma. Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007. Scholarly
treatise examining through a poststructuralist lens the themes of desire and self-
searching in the novels of Winterson and Angela Carter.
Makinen, Merja. The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005. Traces the reception to Winterson’s novels and places them in the context of
modern literary debate. Part of the Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism series.
Onega, Susana. Jeanette Winterson. New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Examines the forms, themes, and ideologies of Winterson’s novels within the context of
the modern British novel. The first full-length study of Winterson’s complete oeuvre.
Reynolds, Margaret, and Jonathan Noakes. Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide.
New York: Vintage Press, 2003. Series of interviews with Winterson in which she dis-
cusses four of her most popular novels. Includes a biography, questions for discussion,
suggestions for further reading, extracts from reviews, a bibliography, and a glossary
of literary terms.
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Bibliography
Every effort has been made to include studies published in 2000 and later. Most items in this bibliography contain a listing of secondary sources, making it easier to identify other critical commentary on novelists, movements, and themes.
Theoretical, thematic, and historical studies
Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Examines the epistolary novel, explaining how novelists use the
letter form to develop characterization, further their plots, and develop meaning.
Beaumont, Matthew, ed. Adventures in Realism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007. Fifteen essays explore facets of realism, which was critical to the development of the novel.
Provides a theoretical framework for understanding how novelists attempt to represent
the real and the common in fiction.
Brink, André. The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Uses contemporary theories of semiotics and
narratology to establish a continuum between early novelists and those of the
postmodern era in their conscious use of language to achieve certain effects. Ranges
across national boundaries to illustrate the theory of the development of the novel since the seventeenth century.
Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. New York: Viking Press, 1982. Feminist survey of novels from the eighteenth century through the
latter half of the twenti
eth century. Examines how “becoming a heroine” defines for
women a sense of value in their lives. Considers novels by both men and women, and
discusses the importance of the traditional marriage plot.
Bruzelius, Margaret. Romancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to Sebald. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Examines the development of the adventure
novel, linking it with the medieval romance tradition and exploring readers’ continu-
ing fascination with the genre.
Cavallaro, Dani. The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror, and Fear. New York: Continuum, 2005. Study of the gothic novel from its earliest manifestations in
the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Through the lenses of contem-
porary cultural theories, examines readers’ fascination with novels that invoke horror,
terror, and fright.
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Traces the roots of the novel, traditionally thought to have been developed in the seventeenth century, to classical Greek and Latin texts that exhibit characteristics of modern fiction.
Hale, Dorothy J., ed. The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000.
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. Collection of essays by theorists and novelists. In-
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cludes commentary on the novel form from the perspective of formalism, structur-
alism, poststructuralism, Marxism, and reader response theory. Essays also address
the novel through the lenses of sociology, gender studies, and feminist theory.
_______. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Emphasizes the novel’s special ability to define a social world for readers. Relies heavily on the works of contemporary literary
and cultural theorists. Provides a summary of twentieth century efforts to identify a
theory of fiction that encompasses novels of many kinds.
Hart, Stephen M., and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. A Companion to Magical Realism. Lon-
don: Tamesis, 2005. Essays outlining the development of Magical Realism, tracing its
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