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Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She grew up in Accrington, a mill town in Northern England. Her adopted parents were Pentecostal Evangelists and deeply committed to god. They raised her for evangelical service. She left home at fifteen when she had her first lesbian relationship and made the mistake of telling her parents about it. As a result she was more or less thrown out of her family and the religious community. Eventually she moved to Oxford where, in 1981, she graduated with an M. A. in English. She moved to London where she worked at the Roundhouse Theater and then as a publisher at Pandora Press. She became a full-time writer in 1987. Since then she has become one of the best known and most highly acclaimed English writers of today. When you read Winterson's text you soon begin to notice that she often returns to some things over and over again, major motifs constantly pop up, but never quite in the same way as before. The themes are: Storytelling vs. Fact, Fairy tale, Religion, Homosexuality, Male vs. Female, Art, and Sappho. There are without exception always several themes working alongside each other in Winterson's texts. It is this fact that I think makes it possible for her to reach so many readers despite the fact that some of her themes and the way she presents them have to be considered rather controversial. In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for the best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared , the fantastical tale of Henri-Napoleon's cook-and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses, and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have to come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." http://www.yudev.com/mfo/britlit/winterson_jeanette.htm |