Jeanette Winterson Ghost Stories (2023)

FAQs

Why did Jeanette Winterson burn her books? ›

Explaining her actions on Twitter, Winterson said she “absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers... So I set them on fire.” On 4 June the novelist Jeanette Winterson burned a dozen or so of her own books and shared a picture of the pyre.

In the late 20th century, Jeanette Winterson forged a path in the literary world with books such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body and The Passion, titles which would attract a cult following and would crown her as a leading author for the queer community.

Eventually Jeanette met her birth mother — Ann. Having breastfed her for six weeks, Ann gave Jeanette up for adoption, as she believed it would be better for her if she had two parents. When Jeanette told her that she was lesbian, Ann told her that she had been married four times — and not to her father.

Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted by Constance and John William Winterson on 21 January 1960. She grew up in Accrington, Lancashire, and was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church.

Beyond the obvious theme of censorship due to book burning, Stafford's major thematic claim lies in the notion that, while burning books has a complex and sordid history, not speaking out to share and gain knowledge (and therefore, create more books) is much worse.

Yes, “the trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it till it's too late.”

Background. The book is semi-autobiographical and is based on Winterson's life growing up in Accrington, Lancashire.

Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), won a Whitbread Award as that year's best first novel. It concerns the relationship between a young lesbian and her adoptive mother, a religious fanatic.

Writing in the introduction to the published script, Winterson said she wanted to challenge "the virtues of the home, the power of the church and the supposed normality of heterosexuality." Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still stands as a powerful coming of age drama.

"I'm not religious, nor would I seek to be," she has said. "But I suppose it's about transcendence. It's because I am convinced of the invisible world beyond the material that I write the way I do." In addition to her Whitbread Prize, Winterson has been the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E.M.

Why does Winterson say that the language of art is not our mother tongue? ›

If the reader can understand Winterson's response to a work of art, and perhaps a shared difficulty in describing just what it is that makes something beautiful, then Winterson's argument for the language of art as “not our mother-tongue” forgets that we can describe what we see, perhaps standing side-by-side before a ...

For more than a decade she was in a relationship with the therapist Susie Orbach, whom she married in 2015, but it ended two years ago, unbeknownst to the wider world.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

1985

Written on the Body

1992

Why be Happy When You Could...

2011

Sexing the Cherry

1989

Frankissstein

2019

The Passion

1987

Over the last thirty years, Jeanette Winterson has worked across the genres of film, essay, novel, children's literature, short story, 'comic' (as Winterson herself describes Boating for Beginners (1985)), even self-help guide: Fit for the Future (1986).

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine.

"Beginning in 213 BCE, all classic works of the Hundred Schools of Thought — except those from Li Ssu's own school of philosophy known as legalism — were subject to book burning. "Qin Shi Huang burned the other histories out of fear that they undermined his legitimacy, and wrote his own history books.

In this sense, it signifies a turning point for Eddie and his mother. That is, by burning books Eddie's mother declares her independence from English oppression whereas Eddie dissociates himself from the Caribbean ties by hating his colored mother now. There is no specific time given in the story.

After the firemen douse her books in kerosene she strikes a match and lights it all on fire herself while she is still inside. She does this to remove the power from the firemen and to send a message. Montag is completely shocked.

The firemen burned books because they did not believe books were healthy for the people to read and learn from, unlike the real world. The firemen were not in charge of putting out fires, they were in charge of taking out books and burning them because they believed they were dangerous to others.