[In the following essay, Rich provides an overview of Winterson's literary career, incorporating Winterson's comments on her own celebrity and public identity as a lesbian writer.]

Jeanette Winterson published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in 1985 at age 26. It made her an instant literary celebrity—and a lesbian hero too, after the BBC filmed her autobiographical tale. She is an adopted daughter of Pentecostals, and she fights God and Mum as her lust for other women surfaces.

Six novels and a book of essays later, Winterson is recognized by the British literary establishment as one of the foremost writers of her generation. Her latest book, Gut Symmetries, proves once again that she is a grand master of literary style, with a knack for coaxing readers through intricate philosophical inquiries or historical details only to flatten them with an erotic sucker punch a few lines later. Yet for all her virtuosity, Winterson is still an outsider to the British press, which seems fixated on her lesbian life as paraded in a long series of real or imagined affairs reported in the tabloid newspapers.

Speaking from the home deep in the British countryside that she shares with her partner of eight years (Peggy Reynolds, the university professor to whom her last four books are dedicated), Winterson gamely tries to make sense of her notoriety. “In the U.K. these days, everything is trivialized,” she begins. “Who you sleep with, how much money you make. It's a poisonous atmosphere. And lesbians have such a fascination for people! All they can do is think about what you do in bed. England was puritanical for so long. Then suddenly everything could be talked about. Now the English are like kids who start talking dirty and go on for years while you wait for them to grow up. For those of us who are gay or lesbian, it's not the only thing we think about day or night.”

During her April U.S. book tour, Winterson enjoyed the mix of gay, straight, and literary audiences. They came, she says, “for the right reason”—the writing. “It's fine here in The Advocate to be talking about myself as a lesbian,” she notes. “But to be constantly forced back to this in the mainstream press is not good for me, because it diminishes the work. That's why I say that I'm not a lesbian writer but a writer who is a lesbian.”

Winterson is quick to add that she thinks “gay writing is certainly valid,” that “it's important to have those books out there making a visible space.” But she thinks of gay writing as “genre fiction” and therefore “not something I want to do.” Still, she's pleased to have a lesbian readership, emphasizing that her view of sex is just more complex: “I don't think any of us who think about ourselves and the world can have uncomplicated sex. The idea of looking for something simple and straightforward is a fantasy that just can't happen. I think all of us have experienced the liberation that sex brings, but essentially it makes you ask more questions, not answer them. Sexuality is always complicated, never open or easy.”

Winterson draws a clear line between her writing and her life off the page. “I do feel a responsibility as an individual who is a lesbian with a public profile,” she says. A charter member of England's Stonewall group, she feels it's essential to “live the kind of life that other gay people can respect and identify with.” And she's angry that, despite her relationship with Reynolds, the press goes right on claiming that Winterson is having affairs with famous married women. “It denies the dignity of what my partner and I have,” she says. “I suppose the view that I've settled down and made a success of something doesn't suit my image as the bad girl of English letters.”

And what a bad girl! Winterson refers sardonically but affectionately to her “early buccaneering self.” It was that youthful self who in 1988 posed for a naked portrait the British papers still love to run next to serious reviews of her books. Much as she regrets that use of the photo, though, she doesn't regret posing for it. And she's glad she lived adventurously after leaving home at 15. “I think it's important to have a lot of sex when you're young,” she says. “Otherwise it explodes in middle age and ruins your life.”

Some of Winterson's “buccaneering” came back to haunt her in January when the London Times Magazine reported that she'd once worked as a lesbian prostitute—and had even bartered her services for Le Creuset cookware. Asked to clear up this mystery, Winterson describes a reality that's less commercial but just as enticing.

It seems she arrived in London as a penniless but appealing teenager and hung out at the legendary Gateways bar, a fixture of the '50s dyke scene that was filled with respectable ladies looking for sweet young things to fill their nights away from their husbands. “Of course they'd pet me and buy me things,” she exclaims. “But for heaven's sake, I wasn't trolling up and down the streets for saucepans!”

Today, older and wiser and proud of her relationship, Winterson is planning her next novel and preparing to adapt her earlier novel The Passion for film. For a hermetic writer with a reputation for being difficult, she is charming and witty and wonderful company. By the end of the conversation, she's even come up with a solution to the burden of her celebrity. “There is a great comfort in knowing that someday I'll be dead,” she says. “And then the work will have to answer for itself.”