Winterson, Jeanette

Winterson, Jeanette (1959- ), British novelist. The adopted daughter of working-class Pentecostal Evangelists, Winterson was born in Manchester and was prepared by her parents to become a preacher. A lesbian affair at the age of 15 estranged her from her family and she left home. Working variously as an ice-cream van driver, a make-up assistant in a funeral parlour, and a domestic in a mental home, she continued her studies, eventually gaining a place to read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. She then worked at the Roundhouse Theatre, London, and thereafter in publishing, until 1987, since when she has been a full-time writer.

Winterson’s first novel, Oranges are not the Only Fruit (1985), was mainly autobiographical, chronicling the struggles of a young lesbian girl against a domineering mother and the strictures of conditioning for evangelical service. A successful television serialization was broadcast in 1990. In between came two more novels, Boating for Beginners (1985), a satirical rehabilitation of the Noah's Ark story, and The Passion (1987), which juxtaposes the tale of a French peasant who is chef to Napoleon with that of a girl from a Venetian fishing community. A third, Sexing the Cherry (1989), sets two 17th-century characters against modern counterparts, and marks a decisive shift in Winterson's style towards a fractured and incantatory rhetoric. The latter, along with Winterson's unselfconscious self-promotion and aggressiveness, prejudiced critics against her. Her next book, Written on the Body (1992), charts a love-triangle, in which the gender of the main character is not specified. Winterson, characteristically, picked the book as her own “Book of the Year” for The Daily Telegraph. In 1995 came Art & Lies, a symposium between characters called Handel, Sappho, and Picasso with no plot and little sense of time or place. Art Objects (1995) was a typically idiosyncratic piece of non-fiction about art and literature.

Winterson's subsequent novels are Gut Symmetries (1997), The. PowerBook (2000), which she also adapted for the National Theatre and Theatre de Chaillot, Paris, in 2002, Lighthousekeeping (2004), and Weight (2005), a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules. In 2006 she published her first book for children, Tanglewreck. She lives in a formerly derelict Georgian house in Spitalfields, East London, which she bought in 1995 and restored. She received an OBE in 2006.