Search

Written on the Body is a meditation on the nature of sexual love and passion as experienced by the first-person narrator, whose name and gender are never revealed. The narrative’s primary focus is on the absent Louise, the most recent and apparently most passionately adored of a series of lovers, both men and women. Details of these earlier affairs are interspersed throughout the novel as points of comparison to the all-consuming passion expressed for Louise. Alternately anguished and exhilarated, cynical and romantic, the monologue immediately establishes the circumstances of lost love, although why and how this loss came about is not revealed until later. The narrator addresses his/her thoughts and ruminations at times to the absent Louise, at others to the reader.

The title Sexing the Cherry refers to determining the gender of a grafted cherry tree. New to the seventeenth century, the art of grafting fruit trees is practiced by the protagonist, Jordan, during his apprenticeship to the Renaissance figure John Tradescant. Metaphorically minded, Jordan seeks to fuse himself with spirits of self-possessed women to form a hardier, more complete self. The form of the novel is itself a graft of perspectives, with its alternating narrations of a mother and her adopted son, which in turn contain the fabulous tales of others, especially women, who overcome obstacles by living fearlessly in new ways.

In a short amount of time, the British writer Jeanette Winterson established a special place for herself in the literary community. Her work began to meet with popular and critical success early on and would go on to be published in fourteen languages. After receiving a degree in English from Oxford University, she set out to look for editorial jobs but met with no success. At an interview for one such job, she told her interviewer stories about her life. The prospective employer encouraged her to write them down, resulting in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).