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Sydney Morning Herald
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
When Jeanette Winterson was 23, she had an interview at the new feminist publisher, Pandora Press, hoping to be their publicist. She didn't get the job. But the way she talked about her extremely strange childhood impressed the publisher, Philippa Brewster, who told Winterson, 'If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.' Winterson had always written: sermons, stories to herself to try to make sense of the world. She hadn't tried to write a novel. 'I thought, I'll sit down and see what happens,' she says. 'I had no idea about gender, sexism, all of that.' But although she came from a family where non-religious books were banned, her mother had read to her daily from the King James Bible, which gave her a love of language, story and structure. What emerged was the fictionalised story of growing up in working-class Accrington, Lancashire, as the adopted child of an eccentric and fiercely Pentecostal evangelist mother. 'I thought I could write my way out,' she says. 'Language is something I can trust, so I can see the inside of my head. You need to be able to write yourself as a fiction, to understand you're a story in progress. I didn't need to be trapped in a narrative that belonged to somebody else.' The story was funny, awfully bizarre and bizarrely awful – what other child would have her deafness ignored because it was thought she was in a state of rapture? – but to the child Jeanette, it was just life, getting on with things while waiting for Jesus to come and roll up heaven like a scroll. Until at 16 she fell in love with a girl, and everything came apart. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better. After a few months of writing, she cycled back to Pandora with the only copy of her manuscript in her saddlebag (she couldn't afford to photocopy it). This time Pandora's other boss, Australian feminist Dale Spender, was in the office with Brewster. 'Dale snatched the manuscript and read the beginning. Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. She turned to Philippa and said, 'This is good.' I thought, Oh, there's a way in for me.' That manuscript became the hugely successful novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. The current publishers, Vintage Classics, are sending their star author around the world to celebrate the book's 40th anniversary. I read it in one breathless swoop, and like many fans, I can't believe it's been 40 years since. Nor can Winterson. She is talking to me from her home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Behind her are windows with a view of the woods and the sun is casting a halo over her curly head. An eager and fervent speaker, she still has her Northern accent. 'I was brought up in a gospel tent, I'm never nervous public speaking,' she says. 'They book me in for a lot of big events. The more people the better. I'm trying to present to people what I believe, that's part of my job.' She's keen to find the positives in even the worst things that have happened to her, and she's hopeful for the future where other writers are gloomy, particularly over her pet subject, the challenges we face with AI. In the early days, Oranges was sometimes slotted into the cookery bookshelves with the marmalade recipes. Later, it made its way onto the LGBTQ shelves. Now it's in with the literary classics and has found new generations of readers around the world. Winterson has since written 10 novels, as well as children's books, nonfiction and screenplays, including one for the prizewinning BBC TV adaptation of Oranges. She has won many awards, including a CBE and an OBE for services to literature, and her work is published in 28 countries. Young people respond to Orange' s queer coming of age story in China and Hungary. 'It's a classic, I'm not the kind of person they would want to ban. At this point in my life I have some useful status, I can get to places other people can't. I'm hoping because it's so well known and well-loved, it will be a kind of raft you can cling onto.' There wasn't much for young Jeanette to cling to when she fell in love. Mrs Winterson and her fellow church members held an exorcism, chanting continuous prayers, speaking in tongues and laying their hands on Jeanette. It had a hypnotic effect, she says. 'They do believe people are inhabited by devils and they can be expelled. But obviously to a young girl it was frightening.' Inevitably, teenage Jeanette had to leave home. She moved around for a couple of years, studying and working, living in a tent and sleeping on other people's floors. 'I thought, I can't pretend to be the person they want me to be. By then, things had broken down and were so full of distress and sadness that to stay would have been far worse.' One of her best times was living in a Mini, with its boot full of her favourite books. 'It wasn't as dramatic as it would be now. I felt free, I wasn't afraid. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.' She eventually made her way to Oxford University to study English literature. 'It was wonderful, I was free to study. It was also a huge cultural shock because people like me were not there in any numbers. I didn't fit. But it changed my life completely; I was able to move into a different world.' Loading Winterson returned to her early years in 2012, this time in a memoir with the title from one of her mother's inspired sayings, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She had come through a painful period after an attempted suicide and felt she needed to go back. With more distance between her and her childhood, she felt free to mention darker things. 'There's a lot more pain and hurt in that book. I could go back to some of the material and not have to disguise it.' One of Mrs Winterson's sayings was 'The devil had led me to the wrong crib'. Still, Winterson can see the bright side: 'It's absolutely appalling, but full of metaphor and colour. Suddenly we're not in a crummy two-up and two-down. We're in a fairy tale, an opera, a grand landscape where the devil will bother to come and deceive Mrs Winterson.' In the memoir, she details her quest to find her birth mother. She succeeded, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing. 'I was glad I found her. I wanted other adopted people to understand if they take that route, they shouldn't imagine there is going to be a pink focus, happy Hollywood ending. We're all going to do our best, but it's fine for it to go wrong.' Loading Winterson did have a reunion with her adoptive father before he died. 'I was angry with him for a long time for not standing up for me, and for beating me. I was glad I could meet him on his own terms, there was no point in going in for explanation. Dad was like a very little boy. I thought he was never really allowed to grow up.' Mrs Winterson died when her daughter was 30, so there was never time for a reunion. In any case, she thinks it would have been impossible. 'She was an absolutist. For her to recognise what happened to me would have reversed everything she believed. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and unhappiness closes you down.' When Winterson wrote Oranges, 'in my innocence I didn't realise that women were only ever supposed to write about their own experience in a small way. But I don't care. If people are still reading it, if it can still be in print 40 years later, all over the world, I have got something right.'
The Age
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
When Jeanette Winterson was 23, she had an interview at the new feminist publisher, Pandora Press, hoping to be their publicist. She didn't get the job. But the way she talked about her extremely strange childhood impressed the publisher, Philippa Brewster, who told Winterson, 'If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.' Winterson had always written: sermons, stories to herself to try to make sense of the world. She hadn't tried to write a novel. 'I thought, I'll sit down and see what happens,' she says. 'I had no idea about gender, sexism, all of that.' But although she came from a family where non-religious books were banned, her mother had read to her daily from the King James Bible, which gave her a love of language, story and structure. What emerged was the fictionalised story of growing up in working-class Accrington, Lancashire, as the adopted child of an eccentric and fiercely Pentecostal evangelist mother. 'I thought I could write my way out,' she says. 'Language is something I can trust, so I can see the inside of my head. You need to be able to write yourself as a fiction, to understand you're a story in progress. I didn't need to be trapped in a narrative that belonged to somebody else.' The story was funny, awfully bizarre and bizarrely awful – what other child would have her deafness ignored because it was thought she was in a state of rapture? – but to the child Jeanette, it was just life, getting on with things while waiting for Jesus to come and roll up heaven like a scroll. Until at 16 she fell in love with a girl, and everything came apart. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better. After a few months of writing, she cycled back to Pandora with the only copy of her manuscript in her saddlebag (she couldn't afford to photocopy it). This time Pandora's other boss, Australian feminist Dale Spender, was in the office with Brewster. 'Dale snatched the manuscript and read the beginning. Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. She turned to Philippa and said, 'This is good.' I thought, Oh, there's a way in for me.' That manuscript became the hugely successful novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. The current publishers, Vintage Classics, are sending their star author around the world to celebrate the book's 40th anniversary. I read it in one breathless swoop, and like many fans, I can't believe it's been 40 years since. Nor can Winterson. She is talking to me from her home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Behind her are windows with a view of the woods and the sun is casting a halo over her curly head. An eager and fervent speaker, she still has her Northern accent. 'I was brought up in a gospel tent, I'm never nervous public speaking,' she says. 'They book me in for a lot of big events. The more people the better. I'm trying to present to people what I believe, that's part of my job.' She's keen to find the positives in even the worst things that have happened to her, and she's hopeful for the future where other writers are gloomy, particularly over her pet subject, the challenges we face with AI. In the early days, Oranges was sometimes slotted into the cookery bookshelves with the marmalade recipes. Later, it made its way onto the LGBTQ shelves. Now it's in with the literary classics and has found new generations of readers around the world. Winterson has since written 10 novels, as well as children's books, nonfiction and screenplays, including one for the prizewinning BBC TV adaptation of Oranges. She has won many awards, including a CBE and an OBE for services to literature, and her work is published in 28 countries. Young people respond to Orange' s queer coming of age story in China and Hungary. 'It's a classic, I'm not the kind of person they would want to ban. At this point in my life I have some useful status, I can get to places other people can't. I'm hoping because it's so well known and well-loved, it will be a kind of raft you can cling onto.' There wasn't much for young Jeanette to cling to when she fell in love. Mrs Winterson and her fellow church members held an exorcism, chanting continuous prayers, speaking in tongues and laying their hands on Jeanette. It had a hypnotic effect, she says. 'They do believe people are inhabited by devils and they can be expelled. But obviously to a young girl it was frightening.' Inevitably, teenage Jeanette had to leave home. She moved around for a couple of years, studying and working, living in a tent and sleeping on other people's floors. 'I thought, I can't pretend to be the person they want me to be. By then, things had broken down and were so full of distress and sadness that to stay would have been far worse.' One of her best times was living in a Mini, with its boot full of her favourite books. 'It wasn't as dramatic as it would be now. I felt free, I wasn't afraid. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.' She eventually made her way to Oxford University to study English literature. 'It was wonderful, I was free to study. It was also a huge cultural shock because people like me were not there in any numbers. I didn't fit. But it changed my life completely; I was able to move into a different world.' Loading Winterson returned to her early years in 2012, this time in a memoir with the title from one of her mother's inspired sayings, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She had come through a painful period after an attempted suicide and felt she needed to go back. With more distance between her and her childhood, she felt free to mention darker things. 'There's a lot more pain and hurt in that book. I could go back to some of the material and not have to disguise it.' One of Mrs Winterson's sayings was 'The devil had led me to the wrong crib'. Still, Winterson can see the bright side: 'It's absolutely appalling, but full of metaphor and colour. Suddenly we're not in a crummy two-up and two-down. We're in a fairy tale, an opera, a grand landscape where the devil will bother to come and deceive Mrs Winterson.' In the memoir, she details her quest to find her birth mother. She succeeded, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing. 'I was glad I found her. I wanted other adopted people to understand if they take that route, they shouldn't imagine there is going to be a pink focus, happy Hollywood ending. We're all going to do our best, but it's fine for it to go wrong.' Loading Winterson did have a reunion with her adoptive father before he died. 'I was angry with him for a long time for not standing up for me, and for beating me. I was glad I could meet him on his own terms, there was no point in going in for explanation. Dad was like a very little boy. I thought he was never really allowed to grow up.' Mrs Winterson died when her daughter was 30, so there was never time for a reunion. In any case, she thinks it would have been impossible. 'She was an absolutist. For her to recognise what happened to me would have reversed everything she believed. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and unhappiness closes you down.' When Winterson wrote Oranges, 'in my innocence I didn't realise that women were only ever supposed to write about their own experience in a small way. But I don't care. If people are still reading it, if it can still be in print 40 years later, all over the world, I have got something right.'
Observer
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
Shakespeare folios expected to fetch more than £3.5m at auction
William Shakespeare's four folios, published more than 300 years ago, are set to go under the hammer, where they are expected to fetch between £3.5 million and £4.5 million. The tomes, which compile Shakespeare's plays, will be sold at Sotheby's in London on 23 May, a month after the Bard's birthday on 23 April. Experts state that the first folio, which contains 36 of Shakespeare's plays, is "the most significant publication in the history of English literature," adding that without it, up to half of the writer's works would have been lost, including "Macbeth," "Twelfth Night," and "Julius Caesar." Alongside the King James Bible, the auctioneers assert that this book has had "the greatest impact on the development of the English language itself." The initial print run of the first book is believed to have been around 750 copies, which led to the release of subsequent volumes to meet demand, with the books published between 1623 and 1685. It is thought that producing the first 750 copies would have cost nearly £100 due to the price of the 227 sheets of crown paper used in each. The folios were compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell, who were close friends of Shakespeare, both being actors and shareholders in the King's Men, the acting company to which Shakespeare belonged for most of his career. Shakespeare even bequeathed money for a mourning ring to the pair in his will. The earliest recorded purchase of the first folio was in December 1623, when Edward Dering bought two copies for £2. The third folio is the rarest of the books, with the Shakespeare Census listing 182 copies still in existence, which is just over half the number of surviving second and fourth folios. Its rarity is believed to be due to a proportion of the stock being destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Born in 1564, Shakespeare is considered one of the UK's greatest writers, with his best-known plays including "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," and "Hamlet." He died on his birthday in 1616 at the age of 52. —PA Media/dpa
Telegraph
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The World of James VI and I: A fascinating tribute to the king of bling
You have to wonder whether history would have been kinder to James VI & I if he had ended up being beheaded. His mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been brought to the scaffold in 1587, her death warrant signed by Elizabeth I – an event that in centuries since has cemented her legacy as a national heroine. In 1649, his son and successor, Charles I, met the same end. By contrast, James is perhaps best remembered as 'the wisest fool in Christendom', an epithet handed down to us by one of his courtiers, Sir Anthony Weldon, who could also be considerably less kind, as when he recalled James continually fidgeting with his codpiece. Weldon's broadside appears at the outset of The World of James VI & I, an exhibition held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh to mark the 400th anniversary of his death. It's a show of considerable nuance, in large part because it doesn't set out to rehabilitate James, as such – rather, it wants you to engage with James on something like his own level. Stuffier exhibitions tell the story of monarchy predominantly with portraiture, and leave you wondering whether you'd have been better getting it from an illustrated book. Not so here, where portraits, letters, clothes, jewellery, ornate glassware and more combine to conjure a rich sense of the charged times in which James ruled, in both his kingdoms – as well as of James's enormous love of bling. The show takes the story of his reign at a canter. In Scotland, he founded Edinburgh University and cultivated a proud Renaissance court; on the other hand, his deeply held superstitions spurred him to rekindle the persecution of witches. In England, he tried in vain to effect an improbable peace with Spain, pursued a policy of unbridled colonisation in Ireland, oversaw the establishment of the first colonial plantations in Virginia, commissioned the King James Bible and enjoyed the company of male favourites such as George Villiers in terms that have had historians speculating ever since. But the real achievement of this exhibition is in understanding that these historical debates are, ultimately, too big for it – it can only point to them. What it can and does achieve is a sense of the sheer splendour of the Stuart court under James – and how James mobilised that splendour to communicate the potency of his dynasty. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when he made the politically questionable decision of transplanting most of his court from Edinburgh to London, he compensated by commissioning portraits, medallions, coins and jewels, circulating images of the entire royal family to as wide an audience as possible – and making it abundantly clear that he had a stable marriage and secure bloodline, which must have been a breath of fresh air after the Tudors.
The Independent
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
To buy or not to buy? 300-year-old Shakespeare books to be auctioned for up to £4.5m
A collection of William Shakespeare books published over 300 years ago are set to go on auction where they are expected to fetch between £3.5 and £4.5 million. The four folios are believed to have been owned by two of Shakespeare's own friends, making them highly precious and valuable items. The books, which compile Shakespeare's plays, will go on sale at Sotheby's in London on 23 May, a month after the Bard's birthday on 23 April. Experts say the first folio, which contains 36 of Shakespeare's plays, is 'the most significant publication in the history of English literature ', adding that without it up to half of the writer's plays would have been lost, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. Alongside the King James Bible, the auctioneers say the book has had 'the greatest impact on the development of the English language itself'. The first book's initial print run is thought to have been around 750 copies, which prompted the release of the subsequent volumes to keep up with demand, with the books published between 1623 and 1685. It is thought that the first 750 books would have cost almost £100 to make, due to the price of the 227 sheets of crown paper in each. The folios were put together by John Heminges and Henry Condell, who were close friends of Shakespeare as actors and shareholders in the King's Men, the acting company to which Shakespeare belonged for most of his career. Shakespeare even left the pair money for a mourning ring in his will. The earliest recorded purchase of the first folio was in December 1623, when Edward Dering bought two copies for £2. The third folio is the rarest of the books, with the Shakespeare Census listing 182 copies still in existence, just over half of the number of surviving second and the fourth folios. It is believed the third book's rarity is because a proportion of stock was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Born in 1564, Shakespeare is considered one of the UK's greatest writers, with his best known plays including Romeo And Juliet, Macbeth and Hamlet. He died on his birthday in 1616 at the age of 52.
