Jeanette Winterson

Standard Name: Winterson, Jeanette
Birth Name: Jeanette Winterson
JW , writing in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, has been acclaimed by some critics and savaged by others for her provocative and outspoken novels, in which she uncompromisingly confronts cultural notions of gender identity, sexuality, and religion. She attempts to change the world through her writing in the manner of but in place of political activism. Her work is widely studied and celebrated by feminist and lesbian readers and critics. Characteristically, she blends many genres: fable, fairytale, fantasy, history, philosophy, lesbian writing, science fiction, magic realism, and scientific studies. She is fond of stories in which the characters are on a journey together.
Photograph of Janette Winterson taken in Warsaw, Poland, on 16 February 2005 by Mariusz Kubik. She has her lips parted, and is apparently speaking into a microphone . She has short, brown,curly hair and wear a black t-shirt with a seahorse logo.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michèle Roberts
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Textual Production Margaret Atwood
Atwood says she first read the Odyssey at about fifteen and was unpleasantly struck by the fact that Odysseus, after his triumphal homecoming and reunion with his faithful wife, kills not only the suitors whom...
Textual Production Natalie Clifford Barney
Jeanette Winterson owns a copy of this novel inscribed in NCB ' hand in July 1936: To my angel Romaine, illustrated by the two pictures of hers, which more clearly than my words, define this...
Textual Features Ali Smith
The subject of voice appears in a more darkly humorous aspect in The Child, wherein the woman narrator finds a baby mysteriously present in her shopping cart. The baby proceeds to spout all manner...
Textual Features Anna Livia
Subtitled A Collection of Lesbian Feminist Love Stories, this volume looks at the intimate relationships between women of various ages, classes, ethnicities, and sexual identities. Along with friendship, hostility, love, and sex, it addresses...
Reception Patricia Highsmith
The appearance of a biography by Andrew Wilson in June 2003 drew a remarkable panegyric on PH from Slavoj žiŽek : for him, he wrote, her name designates a sacred territory; his judgement of her...
Reception Ali Smith
As recipient of the Saltire Literary Award and a 10,000-euro prize from the Scottish Arts Council , Free Love and Other Stories was received with considerable acclaim. According to Jeanette Winterson , AS was actually...
Reception Ali Smith
Hotel World was shortlisted for the 2001 Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. According to her interview with Jeanette Winterson , AS did not bother preparing a victory speech for the Booker...
Reception Shelagh Delaney
Fifty years after the debut of The Lion in Love, Jeanette Winterson called it a depressing essay in sexism.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Other Life Event Sylvia Beach
In the late 1950s SB bequeathed the name and goodwill of Shakespeare and Company to George Whitman , who re-opened it at a new address, 37 rue de la Bûcherie. Under Whitman and later...
Literary responses Carol Ann Duffy
Jeanette Winterson greeted this volume as [b]eautiful and moving poetry for the real world.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Good reading we bring”. Guardian Weekly, edited by Ginny Hooker, p. 54.
54
It won Costa Poetry Award.
Crawforth, Hannah, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, editors. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration. Bloomsbury.
79
Literary responses Helen Dunmore
Reviewers welcomed the totally believable parallel world of these realistic fantasies, discerning in it a haunting, dangerous beauty all of its own.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
The Tide Knot was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize (awarded on the basis...
Literary responses Ephelia
Mulvihill's website at http://marauder.millersville.edu/~resound/ephelia/ offers a great deal of information including identifications, put forward with greater or lesser degrees of certainty, of twenty-three historical personages named in Female Poems on Several Occasions, together with...
Literary responses Edith Sitwell
This collection met with immediate critical acclaim. ES was hailed as a leading poet of her generation.
Greene, Richard. Proposal: Edith Sitwell: A Life.
12
Novelist Jeanette Winterson has recently called Still Falls the Raintremendous.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Not a mother to Marilyn”. Times, p. 39.
39
Literary responses Edith Sitwell
Sitwell was subject to dismissive antifeminist comment from such critics as Geoffrey Grigson and Harold Acton .
Hill, Rosemary. “No False Modesty”. London Review of Books, Vol.
33
, No. 20, pp. 25-6.
26
The poets of the Movement were famously dismissive of ES . Al Alvarez published a notorious and...

Timeline

By 3 March 1470: Sir Thomas Malory, a political prisoner in...

Writing climate item

By 3 March 1470

Sir Thomas Malory , a political prisoner in London, most probably in the Tower, finished compiling and writing his collection of legendaryArthurian romances, Le Morte d'Arthur.

Good Friday 1612: A magistrate broke up a gathering of thirteen...

Building item

Good Friday 1612

A magistrate broke up a gathering of thirteen people at Pendle Hill in Lancashire, on suspicion of their being witches.
Sharpe, James. “Introduction: the Lancashire witches in historical context”. The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, edited by Robert Poole, Manchester University Press, pp. 1-18.

17 August 1612: The trial of the Lancashire witches resulted...

National or international item

17 August 1612

The trial of the Lancashire witches resulted in the execution of seven women and one man.

1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...

Building item

1 January 1916

The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.

16 April 2007: Novelist Yann Martel began a project of sending...

Writing climate item

16 April 2007

Novelist Yann Martel began a project of sending a book every two weeks to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper together with an admonitory letter; on a website he recorded the books sent and gave the...

26 September 2009: The Guardian newspaper carried a number of...

Building item

26 September 2009

The Guardian newspaper carried a number of poems and short prose pieces commissioned in support of the 10:10 initiative to reduce carbon emissions.

6 June 2013: Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, in her...

Writing climate item

6 June 2013

Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo , in her early thirties, published a first novel, We Need New Names, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

2 October 2016: An Italian journalist, Claudio Gatti, in...

Writing climate item

2 October 2016

An Italian journalist, Claudio Gatti , in an article in the New York Review of Books, used financial and publishers' records to unmask the best-selling pseudonymous novelist known as Elena Ferrante as a professional...

Texts

Winterson, Jeanette. “A Short”. The Times, No. 67746, p. 6S.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art and Lies. Cape, 1994.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. Cape, 1995.
Winterson, Jeanette, and Paula Youens. Boating for Beginners. Methuen, 1985.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Cut Out and Keep”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 52-4.
Winterson, Jeanette. Fit for the Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well. Pandora, 1986.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Good reading we bring”. Guardian Weekly, edited by Ginny Hooker, p. 54.
Winterson, Jeanette. Great Moments in Aviation and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Two Filmscripts. Vintage, 1994.
Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. Granta, 1997.
Winterson, Jeanette, and Amelia Opie. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, Pandora Press, 1986, p. v - viii.
Winterson, Jeanette. “It must be her hormones”. The Guardian, pp. Review 2 - 3.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Jeanette Winterson: we need to be more imaginative about modern marriage”. theguardian.com.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Jeanette Winterson: why I fasted for 11 days”. theguardian.com.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Malice behind author’s unmasking”. Guardian Weekly, p. 26.
Winterson, Jeanette. “My hero: Shelagh Delaney”. Guardian.co.uk.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Not a mother to Marilyn”. Times, p. 39.
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Pandora, 1985.
Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Adapted from her novel by Jeanette Winterson. Pandora, 1990.
Winterson, Jeanette, editor. Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction with a Twist. Pandora, 1986.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Patricia Highsmith, Hiding in Plain Sight”. The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. Bloomsbury, 1989.
Winterson, Jeanette. Tanglewreck. Bloomsbury, 2006.
Winterson, Jeanette. The Daylight Gate. Cornerstone Hammer, 2012.
Winterson, Jeanette. The Gap in Time. The Winter’s Tale Retold. Vintage Hogarth, 2015.
Winterson, Jeanette. “The horse in the snow”. The Guardian, pp. Review 4 - 5.