SOURCE: Carter, Keryn. “The Consuming Fruit: Oranges, Demons, and Daughters.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 1 (fall 1998): 15–23.

In the following essay, Carter explores the mother-daughter relationship in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, arguing that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre acts as a mother-text for the heroine, Jeannette.

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit cites two of the most painful events of her childhood as follows: first, the moment in which she discovered, by reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre for herself, that her mother had been rewriting the ending of Brontë's story when reading it out loud to her (72–73). In the mother's version, Jane Eyre marries St. John Rivers and the couple become missionaries. The narrator of Oranges views her mother's revision as an act of betrayal and refuses to read Jane Eyre ever again. She then states that that event...