SOURCE: Turner, Jenny. “A Tulip and Two Bulbs.” London Review of Books 22, no. 17 (7 September 2000): 10–11.

In the following review, Turner discusses the development of Winterson's fiction and offers a mixed assessment of The PowerBook.

We all know of writers who just keep writing the same book, but what is sadder is when a true writer seems to run out of books. T. S. Eliot observed that to continue to develop stylistically, a writer had to continue to develop emotionally … It is a commonplace of psychology that human beings, beyond a certain age, find it difficult to supplement their personalities with new emotional understandings. If this happens to the writer, she is lost.

Jeanette Winterson, ‘A Work of My Own,’ Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, (1995)

From the outside, Jeanette Winterson's new book looks quite different from what she usually does. Instead of one of those browny-orangey oil paintings...