Jeanette grew up with an extremely rigid view of the world, a binary one consisting of Good and Evil.
Their God was not kind and forgiving, it was the vengeful God of the Old Testament. Mother did not send Jeanette to school, condemning it as a ‘Breeding Ground’ for sin and evil she taught Jeanette a basic level of education using the Bible as her main teaching aid.
Jeanette was her personal project to train to serve the Lord as a missionary, going out to convert the ‘heathens’ to Christ (attitudes such as this were prevalent and generally unchallenged in the 1960s and 70s). It was one of the many half-truths her mother told her throughout her childhood and adolescence. This was not strictly true, as Jeanette would later find out when her birth mother tried, and failed, to see her.
She chose not and adopted her, telling her that she was a foundling. Jeanette’s mother could have had children of her own. Winterson drew on her own unusual childhood, growing up in a strict religious home and church in a mill town in the North of England. Winterson's voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you've never heard before." - Ms.North West Reads Book 10: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson Published in 1985, Jeanette Winterson’s debut novel won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel and was adapted as a drama by the BBC. "If Flannery O'Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical first novel. Jeanette's insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind-and on reporting them with wit and passion-makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl's adolescence. Winterson went on to fulfill that promise, producing some of the most dazzling fiction and nonfiction of the past decade, including her celebrated memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson's extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. The New York Times–bestselling author's Whitbread Prize–winning debut-"Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel" ( The Washington Post Book World).
0 kommentar(er)
