Jeanette winterson author biography outline

Provocative and talented, Jeanette Winterson has influenced both popular and literary culture in England. Whether writing newspaper articles or novels, she is unafraid of controversy and never apologizes for her moral stances on topics ranging from women's rights to global politics. By challenging such institutions as marriage and family, Winterson aims to transcend established boundaries of gender and sexual identity with her presentation of a feminine perspective of passion, romantic love, and the search for self-knowledge.

Jeanette winterson autobiography

Inspired by the modernists, Winterson writes fiction that combines intriguing characters with postmodern self-consciousness, at the same time exploring unconventional concepts of reality and dimension. Adopted in infancy by Pentecostal evangelists John and Constance Winterson, she grew up in Lancashire, in northern England. Winterson's father worked in a local television factory.

Her mother, a religious zealot, oversaw her education, limiting the literature available in their household to the Bible as she trained her daughter to become a missionary. At the age of eight, Winterson was composing sermons, a practice that sharpened the rhetoric skills she would later use in her career as a writer. During her teenage years, she became a voracious reader when, in a public library, she discovered the wide worlds of literature and history beyond the Bible.

On Her Own: Leaving Home After being scorned by her family and rejected by the church for having an affair with one of its female converts, Winterson left home when she was sixteen, supporting herself by working odd jobs as a makeup artist in a funeral parlor, an ice cream vendor, and an orderly in a psychiatric hospital. During this time, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, a leader not popular among many people in the working class, most particularly for her emphatic stance against trade unions.

In , Winterson received a master's degree in English from St. Catherine's College, Oxford. After an editor, who was interviewing Winterson for a position at Pandora Press in , admired her gift for language and storytelling, Winterson began writing creatively. Reinventing Life in Fiction Winterson began her literary career by reinventing her life in fiction.

When Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit debuted in , it was an immediate critical and popular sensation and won the Whitbread First Novel Award, despite its openly lesbian theme and its controversial view of family and religious values.