Overview

These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in pieces on Modernism, autobiography, style, painting, the future of fiction, in two essays on Virginia Woolf, and more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her work and the books that she loves.

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Flashes of sly wit have an epigrammatic power... On Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Dickens and the development of English literature she is acute and always interesting...covetable, infuriating, stimulating * Independent * Winterson is in fine form in these essays about art * Observer * Courageous... Her writing is spirited and insouciant in its fusing of love of words and sensual desire * Scotsman *

A self-important grab bag of essays on art, sex, and writing by one of England's preeminent literary talents. Despite her professed admiration for Modernist giants such as Virginia Woolf, Winterson's (Art and Lies, p. 105, etc.) vision is essentially a Romantic one, tricked up with a few stylistic gimmicks to give it a high-gloss experimental veneer. Following in a long, proud tradition from Wordsworth to Eliot, Winterson uses these essays to propound aesthetic theories that, stripped to their essence, are nothing so much as celebrations and justifications of her own work. Still there is something both noble and fussily quaint about her high regard for art and the artist, her faith that they still hold an overwhelming importance: If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?' When she neglects her self-conscious stylings and self-preoccupation, when she doesn't try so hard for ecstasy and effrontery, Winterson can be a fine writer. These essays are decorated throughout with sensitive perceptions and beautifully nuanced phrasings (consider the title's subtle pun), but sooner or later she feels the need to be a WRITER again and begins stomping recklessly about her carefully arranged china shop. While we can't usually choose our intellectual influences, Winterson also reflects a particularly insular British kind of parochialism that does not seem to recognize any literature west of the Liffey and later than 1945. Strange for a writer who so strenuously - at least in these essays - rejects realism and blindly following tradition: If prose-fiction is to survive it will have to do more than to tell a story. Fiction that is printed television is redundant fiction. Despite their occasional glimmerings, few of these essays measure up to even the briefest paragraphs from one of Winterson's novels. (Kirkus Reviews)

Courageous... Her writing is spirited and insouciant in its fusing of love of words and sensual desire * Scotsman * Winterson is in fine form in these essays about art * Observer * Flashes of sly wit have an epigrammatic power... On Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Dickens and the development of English literature she is acute and always interesting...covetable, infuriating, stimulating * Independent *

Courageous... Her writing is spirited and insouciant in its fusing of love of words and sensual desire Scotsman Winterson is in fine form in these essays about art Observer Flashes of sly wit have an epigrammatic power... On Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Dickens and the development of English literature she is acute and always interesting...covetable, infuriating, stimulating Independent

Author Information

Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn't work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She writes regularly for the Guardian. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

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