Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
This book was warmly welcomed in The Guardian by Kathleen Jamie
, who found it both unique and timely, written with great skill, judgment and good humour.
Jamie, Kathleen. “Noises off”. The Guardian, 15 Nov. 2008.
Jeanette Winterson
picked it as a favourite read...
Literary responses
Grace Nichols
GN
's publishers quote glowing opinions about her work. Gwendolyn Brooks
has praised her rich music, an easy lyricism . . . also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean,Jeanette Winterson
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. 1999.
12
Novelist Jeanette Winterson
has recently called Still Falls the Raintremendous.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Not a mother to Marilyn”. Times, 20 Feb. 1997, p. 39.
Hill, Rosemary. “No False Modesty”. London Review of Books, Vol.
33
, No. 20, 20 Oct. 2011, pp. 25-6.
26
The poets of the Movement were famously dismissive of ES
. Al Alvarez
published a notorious and...
Literary responses
Shelagh Delaney
SD
is to an unusual extent identified with her successful first play and with nothing else. In 2010 Jeanette Winterson
wrote an exasperated piece on her entitled My hero: Shelagh Delaney. A Taste of...
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, 16 Dec. 2011, p. 54.
54
It won Costa Poetry Award.
Crawforth, Hannah, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, editors. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration. Bloomsbury, 2016.
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.
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
Adrienne Rich
Rich was during her lifetime and still is widely acclaimed and honoured as a major poet, theorist, and critic of culture. Her poetry and prose have been examined in literary and social criticism, and in...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
Orlando continues to arouse strong positive and negative feeling. Jeanette Winterson
's celebration of it in July 2002 (on a BBC2
programme entitled Art That Shook the World) as one of the great turning...
Literary responses
Louise Page
Several reviewers found the story cumbersome or convoluted,
Eisen, Kurt. “Louise Page”. British Playwrights, 1956-1995. A Research and Production Source Book, edited by William W. Demastes, Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 291-00.
294
but Jeanette Winterson
in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that Louise Page had done well in keeping her simple tale uncluttered.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Literary responses
Ruth Padel
Linda France
, reviewing this book for Mslexia, called it intimate, animated, and inviting.
France, Linda. “One of a Kind”. Mslexia, No. 26, Sept. 2005, p. 53.
53
For Jeanette Winterson
it was sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive.
qtd. in
Crown, Sarah. “A life in poetry: Ruth Padel”. The Guardian, 16 May 2009.
Her election was marred by unpleasantness. Another of the three short-listed candidates, Caribbean poet Derek Walcott
, withdrew from the competition after a letter-writing campaign brought to the attention of potential voters the fact that...
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...
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...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
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.
Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. Bloomsbury, 1987.
Winterson, Jeanette. The PowerBook. Jonathan Cape, 2000.
Winterson, Jeanette. The Stone Gods. Penguin, 2007.
Winterson, Jeanette. The World and Other Places. Jonathan Cape, 1998.
Winterson, Jeanette. “When all the ladies loved Paris”. Times.
Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Jonathan Cape, 2011.
Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Cape, 1992.
