A birthday present from Sheila and Jon. Written in 1985, this was
Winterson's first book, and many of the themes are here that she
would develop further in her later writing. In particular she plays
with the line between true story and fiction in her account of the
coming-of-age of a young woman named Jeanette whose fundamental
Christian upbringing is very much at odds with her emerging
homosexuality. The story is the most linear of anything I've read by
Winterson, though there are some wonderful hallucinatory digressions
and twisted fairy tales. Winterson does a great job of showing the
sheer lunacy of Jeanette's church, but I liked how she made the point
that this church was a place where a woman could become a leader and
have a measure of power that she might not have gained elsewhere in
1960s England. If Jeanette didn't like girls, she would have been a
missionary and set out to convert the masses. The Lord works in
mysterious ways.
"When thick rinds are used the top must be thoroughly skimmed, or a
scum will form marring the final appearance."
—From The Making of Marmalade by Mrs Beeton
"Oranges are not the only fruit."
—Nell Gwynn
| 
Heidi J. De Vries
