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Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Essayist
Benaroya Hall, Wednesday,
November 8, 2000
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Jeanette Winterson had an unusual childhood. She was born in 1959 in Manchester,
England and was adopted by Pentecostal parents, who brought her up in
the nearby mill-town of Accrington. From an early age, her parents groomed
her to become a missionary and by the time she was eight, Winterson was
writing and delivering sermons at local church “tent meetings.”
Reading was not encouraged in the Winterson home unless it was the Bible,
which was one of six books in the family library. However, Mallory’s
Morte d’Arthur was also in the collection, and it was reading
this classic that spurred Winterson’s life-long fascination with
reading and writing.
At 15, Winterson’s love affair with another girl was discovered and
condemned by her church and community. She left home at 16 and supported
herself for the next few years through various odd jobs, including working
as an ice-cream van driver, a funeral parlor make-up artist, and a domestic
worker in a mental institution. While working, she continued her education
and eventually earned her B.A. in English from Oxford University in 1981.
After college, Winterson worked for the next six years in London for a
theatre and then for a publishing company. During that time she wrote
her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which won
the prestigious Whitbred Award for a first novel. With the release of
her next two award-winning novels, The Passion (1987) and Sexing
the Cherry (1989), Winterson established herself as a highly original
new voice in contemporary literature. These novels, as well as her later
works, explore the topics and themes of feminism, fantasy, sexuality,
history, and myth, with lyrical and imaginative prose. The New York
Times remarked that Winterson “possesses the ability to combine
the biting satire of Swift with the ethereal magic of Garcia Marquez,
the ability to reinvent old myths even as she creates new ones of her
own.” Winterson is also the author of the experimental novels Written
on the Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994) and Gut Symmetries
(1997), as well as a collection of essays, Art Objects (1995).
Winterson
is the recipient of numerous awards, including the BAFTA Best Drama and
the Prix Italia awards for her television adaptation of Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit; the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for The
Passion; and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters for Sexing the Cherry. Her work has been translated
into more than 16 languages. She resides in England in the Gloucestershire
countryside and in London.
Excerpt
Taken from The Passion (1998)
There
is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and
roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your
way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred
eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which
is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell
your fortune, depending on your face.
This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the
same place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so, it
will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you here. Your
course in compass reading will fail you. Your confident instructions to
passers-by will send them to squares they have never heard of, over canals
not listed in the notes.
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no
such thing as straight ahead. No as the crow flies short cut will help
you to reach the café just over the water. The short cuts are where
the cats go, through the impossible gaps, round corners that seem to take
you the opposite way. But here, in this mercurial city, it is required
you do awake your faith.
With faith, all things are possible.
Rumour has it that the inhabitants of this city walk on water. That, more
bizarre still, their feet are webbed. Not all feet, but the feet of the
boatmen whose trade is hereditary.
This is the legend.
When a boatman’s wife finds herself pregnant she waits until the
moon is full and the night empty of idlers. Then she takes her husband’s
boat and rows to a terrible island where the dead are buried. She leaves
her boat with rosemary in the bows so that the limbless ones cannot return
with her and hurries to the grave of the most recently dead in her family.
She has brought her offerings: a flask of wine, a lock of hair from her
husband and a silver coin. She must leave the offerings on the grave and
beg for a clean heart if her child be a girl and boatman’s feet if
her child be a boy. There is no time to lose. She must be home before
dawn and the boat must be left for a day and a night covered in salt.
In this way, the boatmen keep their secrets and their trade. No newcomer
can compete. And no boatman will take off his boots, no matter how you
bribe him. I have seen tourists throw diamonds to the fish, but I have
never seen a boatman take off his boots.
Selected
Works
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
The Passion (1987)
Sexing the Cherry (1989)
Written on the Body (1992)
Gut
Symmetries (1997)
The. Powerbook (2000)
Web
Site Links
Jeanette Winterson's own site
The Modern Word's biography
on Winterson
Salon.com interview
with Winterson
The Jeanette Winterson Reader's Site
Underwritten
by The Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas
Photo: Jayne Wexler Photography
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