It’s about survival and broken-heartedness, and cruelty and madness. The Passion is about war, and the private acts that stand against war. be presented by the example of the novel The Passion, written in 1987. She will tell your fortune depending on your face. In this paper the different literary genres which Jeanette Winterson knows to combine. The woman she loves steals her heart and hides it in a jar. “The Passion is set in a world where the miraculous and the everyday collide,” she writes on her website. Instead, Winterson suggests that the novel uses history as “invented space”, a setting for magical characters and weird and wonderful events.

This is the story of Henri, a young Frenchman sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars, and of Villanelle, a cross-dressing Venetian woman, born with webbed feet.Īlthough the action takes place during the Napoleonic era, and the book conveys a wonderful sense of the period, the author rejects the idea that The Passion is a historical novel. An epic tale which straddles early nineteenth-century Europe, The Passion is set amongst the frozen wastes of Russia and the exotic, crumbling decadence of Venice. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.It’s been a while since I read a magical book, so this week I picked up an old favourite, and re-read my dog-eared copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains.

We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Winterson, now deceased, was out of scale, larger. Tallish and weighing around 20 stone (in other words, about 280 pounds), Mrs. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. Jeanette Winterson Andrew Testa for The New York Times. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all.

“Lovers are not at their best when it matters.

Jeanette winterson's the passion