Summary

There are only six books in the Winterson house. Mrs. Winterson is determined that Jeanette have no secular influences. Jeanette believes that size is important and that "being the right size for your world -- and known that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions -- is a valuable clue to learning how to live" (35). Mrs. Winterson is too big for her world, and crouches "gloomy and awkward under its low shelf, now and again exploding" (35).

Jeanette goes to the Accrington public library and begins to read the classics of English literature alphabetically. When Jeanette is sixteen, her mother is about to throw her out of the house for having sex with another woman. That is when she discovers T.S Eliot and poetry. Faced with the "practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how...