ABSTRACT
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and adopted by a couple who were fiercely evangelical Pentecostal Christians. Winterson remains a defiantly 'experimental' novelist and most of her experiments yield interesting results. She has shown an admirable willingness to experiment with form and language in the fiction she has written since her debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1985. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit clearly draws very heavily on Winterson's own experiences. Boating for Beginners was published a few months after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Winterson, while not disowning the book, tends to be rather dismissive of it, calling it 'a comic book with pictures' on her official website. Winterson's use of history as 'invented space' continued with Sexing the Cherry. In this novel the space is seventeenth-century England but it is a seventeenth-century England unimagined by most historians.
