Winterson is definitely a key figure in my development as a reader. She may have been the first 'literary' writer whose work I really loved, and she was definitely my very favourite author for a few years there. I'm a bit vague on the timing, but I think it must've been lateish high school or very early uni that I discovered her - maybe even in that mythical summer between school and uni. I remember giving Kim a copy of one of her books (Art & Lies, maybe), only to discover that she already knew and loved Winterson's work. I remember drifting off to sleep, ideas and images dancing before my eyes, re-reading The Passion one drowsy summer afternoon in the Alexandra gardens, under the dappled shade of a gigantic tree. I remember writing an extended appreciation of Written On The Body for my 4000 word final paper in "Reading Sexuality", even though Winterson's work didn't appear on the course at all. And I was still enough of a fan to give Daniel R a Winterson book (Gut Symmetries, I think) at some point in the gathering twilight of our doomed acquaintance...which brings us at least up to, say, mid-2002.
Somewhere along the line, though, I moved on. It was in the period before or around the time that The.Powerbook came out; I remember being utterly unexcited by the prospect of reading it, and only got round to doing so a couple of years after its initial release. At that time, I wasn't reading very much at all outside of uni-related reading (and not all that much of that, either - a real extended grey winter of discontent which stretched for a couple of years or so and still isn't hasn't properly departed), and somehow when I emerged from the non-reading period, I'd gotten over Winterson. I no longer found her work particularly profound: what had seemed such glimmering, beautiful, poetic prose now looked merely self-consciously precious; what I'd found so insightful and meaningful had come to appear distressingly trite and insubstantial. It's not that I'd actually read any of her stuff recently at that stage - but just that I'd reevaluated my impressions of old reading (always a tricky thing to do).
A few further years on now, though, and things look slightly different again. Although when I did eventually read The.Powerbook, and Lighthousekeeping too, neither inspired me, I began to wonder if perhaps the violence of my swing away from her was more due to the exaggeration caused by disillusionment in relation to something I'd rated so highly than to an honest, 'objective' appraisal of how good she is or was (a telling ambiguity).
So anyhow, I've just re-read Sexing the Cherry for this "Contemporary Historical Fictions" subject, and y'know, it isn't too bad after all. These days, I'm far better versed in the sorts of ideas to do with perception, representation, reality, being (and time), identity, gender, writing, language, and so on (though not at all regarding love, the other big one in this book and throughout her oeuvre) which are Winterson's stock in trade than I was last time round, and so I can more clearly see the derivativeness in her writing...but I can also, having pushed through that initial disillusioning realisation that her ideas weren't particularly new after all, appreciate the deftness with which she synthesises and plays with the fluidity of these concepts...and after all, even if she wasn't the first to think these things, in many cases it was Winterson who introduced me to them, opening my mind and imagination in so many ways. (It's also made me realise how heavily my own writing of that time - 2001-2002ish - was marked by Winterson's style.)
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On a different note, it was interesting to read this book, with which I'm very familiar, through the particular prism of 'contemporary historical fictions' - it definitely brings different aspects of the text into the foreground. I'd had a similar experience while reading V. The seminar discussion regarding that latter was good - I enjoyed it, thought that we covered a lot of the most important aspects of Pynchon's novel, and was forced to think through and struggle to articulate some of my more intuitive and deeper responses to it. Not sure how the seminar on Sexing the Cherry will go, as I think many of its aspects will be flattened out by the focus on its historical/historiographical nature, but it should be interesting nonetheless.
