SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Devil in the Flesh.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 5 (4 March 1993): 22–23.

In the following review, Annan praises Winterson's literary talents, but finds the self-pitying and “preachy” authorial persona of Written on the Body unappealing.

Written on the Body is the fifth novel by the British writer Jeanette Winterson. She published her first in 1985 when she was twenty-six. It was autobiographical and in some ways a more cheerful replay of The Way of All Flesh, with a mother and daughter instead of a father and son at loggerheads in a sectarian family. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won a prize and became a successful television play. And no wonder, because the story Winterson had to tell was piquant and extraordinary, and so was her manner of telling it.

The heroine of Oranges—called Jeanette—grows up in a lower-middle-class family in an industrial town in...