Born August 27: Jeanette Winterson

Given that in 2011 she wrote one of the finest queer books of this decade, her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle], winner of a Stonewall UK award and a Lambda Literary Award, is it unkind and unfair to ask where is Jeanette Winterson's next great novel? Her best-known fiction is still her first, her landmark debut from 1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which covers many of the events revisited in the memoir. She wrote it in two months because she needed money; it won the Whitbread and became a modern classic. Five years later the television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama. To my mind, her finest is The Passion [Kindle], which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1987. Two years later she released her most ambitious novel, Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. And in 1992 she published a novel about an affair, Written on the Body, which virtually everyone took to be inspired by her romantic liaison with her literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, married to Julian Barnes until her death in 2008. At that point Winerson was four years into her twelve-year partnership with Peggy Reynolds, to whom she dedicated "with love" her novel about her affair.

But aren't the six adult novels in the twenty-one years since then -- Art & Lies, Gut Symmetries, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, Weight, The Stone Gods -- more about the author's idea than the characters? In the past ten years she has also written two children's picture books (The King of Capri, The Lion, The Unicorn and Me), a middle-grade chapter book (Tanglewreck), two YA historical novels (The Battle of the Sun, The Daylight Gate), and an original hour-long special for CBBC on Christmas 2009 called Ingenious. She's creative, she won't be pinned down, she's prolific, she's a workaholic -- in her spare time she runs the organic cornershop Verde's in the ground floor of her Georgian house in Spitalfields -- but for all her admirable busyness is she somehow wasting her time? Earlier this summer she announced she's reworking A Winter's Tale for the upcoming series The Hogarth Shakespeare.

Comments

[Sandy]

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell.

I am enamored of Miss Winterson and have enjoyed everything I've read or watched or listened to. Some more than others. You understand.

I was going to recount here my encounter with her on her (first!) Boston visit, but then realized that I've already written about it here: http://sandyleonardsnaps.blogspot.com/search?q=winterson