SOURCE: Stuart, Andrea. “Terms of Endearment.” New Statesman & Society 5, no. 220 (18 September 1992): 37–38.

In the following review, Stuart comments on some strengths and weaknesses of Written on the Body.

The language of love: how do you breathe life into it? How do you make it new after centuries of systematic literary abuse, top 20 toons, and the gauzy clichés of Hollywood? That is the challenge Jeanette Winterson has set herself in her latest novel, Written on the Body. “Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?”

Presented exclusively from the perspective of the genderless narrator (a conceit really, since she is so obviously a woman enamoured of women), it is the story of the word-painter's love for Louise as it unfolds amid the memories and debris of past relationships. But Louise, the cherished “body” of the...