![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In a newspaper interview in 1994, she was asked for her ‘Book of the Year’ and, in typically contrarian style, she chose her then most recent book, Written on the Body (Onega 2006, 3). Winterson has never been shy of self-promotion. Yet, returning to the book now, thirty years later, its playfulness and prescience are undeniable.Ĭover of the 1992 first edition of Written on the Body. Such response was partly due to the text’s apparent regurgitation of romantic platitudes, for all its apparent attempts to dismantle them, and a sense that Winterson’s expansive creativity was not on full display. As Merja Makinen notes, however, the critical reception of Written on the Body left something to be desired, with most reviews ‘ambivalent’ at best and harsh at worst (2005, 110-111). ![]() Published in September 1992, Written on the Body is Winterson’s fifth book and, due to the immense success of her debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Winterson’s readership, as well as the press, had high hopes for its publication. The proceeding narrative (Winterson does not like to call her books ‘novels’) then seeks to deconstruct the clichés and stereotypes of love, to understand and remake it, and to find a ‘precise expression’ of it (1993, 10). On the first page of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, which was first published thirty years ago this month, the nameless narrator declares: ‘Love demands expression’ (1993, 9). September 2022 – Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (1992) ![]()
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