SOURCE: Petro, Pamela. “A British Original.” Atlantic Monthly 271, no. 2 (February 1993): 112–15.

In the following review, Petro praises Winterson's prose in Written on the Body, comparing it to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion.

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson's new novel, Written on the Body, once had a girlfriend “who thought it rude to wear shorts in front of public monuments.” The same narrator also had a boyfriend named Bruno who found Jesus under a wardrobe. Considering some of Jeanette Winterson's earlier creations, from a beautiful Venetian croupier with webbed feet to an evangelical child preacher with lesbian inclinations—not to forget the seventeenth-century giantess known as the Dog-Woman—her new narrator runs with pretty tame company. This is not to say that Written on the Body is a tame novel. Winterson has always been a sorceress with language; her slim books are packed...