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Hannah Tennant-Moore

All articles by this author

On Jeanette Winterson

On Jeanette Winterson

Winterson often conveys “failure of feeling”—which she cites in her memoir as the cause of her own biggest mistakes—by depicting marriages that are maintained only for convenience. On the whole, her work argues for the rejection of the prescribed social roles that are satirized by writers like Amis and considered philosophically by writers like Barnes.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Today most patrons of the arts are secular liberals who see art as either a reminder of beauty in an imperfect world or a social inquiry into the world’s imperfections. Perhaps this is why Winterson—the author of nineteen novels and a household name in Britain—has been widely celebrated as a writer of magical realism and shrewd fairytales, but has not been critically appreciated for what she feels is the supreme goal of fiction: to be “as successful as religion used to be at persuading us of the doubtfulness of the seeming-solid world.”