It’s about survival and broken-heartedness, and cruelty and madness.

The Passion is about war, and the private acts that stand against war. Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion is an absolute favorite novel that, like the heart hidden in a jar, now contains my heart within its pages. She will tell your fortune depending on your face. The woman she loves steals her heart and hides it in a jar. “The Passion is set in a world where the miraculous and the everyday collide,” she writes on her website. Instead, Winterson suggests that the novel uses history as “invented space”, a setting for magical characters and weird and wonderful events. It uses magic realism, a deft interweaving of different stories which some may describe as fairy stories and a witty but well told exposition of the concept of passion. This is the story of Henri, a young Frenchman sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars, and of Villanelle, a cross-dressing Venetian woman, born with webbed feet.Īlthough the action takes place during the Napoleonic era, and the book conveys a wonderful sense of the period, the author rejects the idea that The Passion is a historical novel. This was the novel that finally brought Winterson fame, after the poorly received Boating for Beginners and a fascinating work it is. An epic tale which straddles early nineteenth-century Europe, The Passion is set amongst the frozen wastes of Russia and the exotic, crumbling decadence of Venice. READ REVIEW THE PASSION by Jeanette Winterson RELEASE DATE: An exhilarating tale of lust, love and magical transformations of the heart during ten years of the Napoleonic Wars, first published in England in 1987. It’s been a while since I read a magical book, so this week I picked up an old favourite, and re-read my dog-eared copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.

The passion jeanette winterson review