The fiction of Jeanette Winterson: storytelling, fantasy, humour

Focusing on Winterson’s two early novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion published in the 1980s, and The Daylight Gate published recently in 2013, we shall explore the development of her fiction and the changes in the interplay between realism and fantasy that it displays. Humorously recasting episodes from Winterson’s early life in Accrington, Lancashire, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit focuses on the narrator Jeanette’s relationship with her adoptive mother and her experience of preaching in the local Pentecostal Church. It also treats the punitive treatment that she suffers from its ministers as a result of engaging in a love affair with her friend Melanie. Winterson intersperses these episodes with a series of fantasy narratives recasting fairy tale and myth that comment metaphorically on their significance.

The Passion, in contrast, creates an innovative version of historical fiction. Set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars and focusing on the city of Venice and the myths that it has inspired, the novel explores, as the title suggests, the different romantic attachments and obsessions that the protagonist Villanelle and her lover Henry experience. The Daylight Gate is also a work of historical fiction, though one with a darker, more eerie atmosphere. Recasting the story of the Pendle witches who were tried at Lancaster Assizes in 1603, it introduces reference to the uncanny realm of Pendle Forest and employs Gothic imagery of spectrality and shape-shifting.