[In the following excerpt, Sutherland finds flaws in what he sees as the “formulaic plot” and thinly-veiled sentimentality of Written on the Body.]

When Roy Campbell's wife was seduced by the voracious Vita Sackville-West the poet went to his friend C. S. Lewis expecting sympathy. Lewis's reaction on being told of the episode was fascinated silence followed by the brutal exclamation: ‘Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!’ Campbell's male pride never recovered. Sixty years later the idea still seems odd to me. Written on the Body takes the most familiar of fiction's triangles—husband, wife, seducer—but in this case the seducer of the wife is a woman. Despite an overpoweringly confessional manner (the novel is written as the seducer's intimate journal), she never discloses her name. One says ‘her’ name, but neither is the narrator's gender clearly specified. The fact that he/she apparently sits down to urinate, and late in the novel is described as wearing a lime-green body stocking and a coronet of artificial crocuses, strongly suggests womanhood. So does Winterson's general avoidance of male characters. Whoever or whatever she is, she concedes nothing to conventional femininity. In one of her lighter moments she brags about former conquests with a bravado reminiscent of Bill Naughton's Cockney Casanova, Alfie. This is funny, but unexpected. Unexpected, too, is the scene where the narrator does a Mike Hammer on the weedy, thoroughly unmanned Jewish physician husband:

‘Elgin, you're a doctor, aren't you? Then you'll recall that a doctor can guess the size of someone's heart by the size of their fist. Here's mine.’ I saw Elgin's look of complete astonishment as my fists, locked together in unholy prayer, came up in a line of offering under his jaw. Impact. Head snapped back, sick crunch like a meat grinder. Elgin at my feet in foetus position bleeding. He's making noises like a pig at the trough … As I propped his crushed face a tooth dropped out. Gold. I put his glasses on the hall table and walked slowly down the steps towards the car.

Put such passages on a Practical Criticism paper and not one examinee in a thousand would guess that the narrator is a woman. Like aggressive cross-dressing, the appropriation of traditional male rhetorics is unsettling, at least to SWM/SWF readers, and, one supposes, calculatedly so. What Jeanette Winterson claims in Written on the Body is a new right, a new equality with men—the right of woman-on-woman adultery. More important, Winterson wants that right and no one (particularly not men) to snigger. The lesbian Scarlet Letter is to be worn with the pride of an active service medal.

At one point the narrator reminisces on the subject of what she has done in the sexual way and what it should be called:

We went home to my flat and you brought nothing from your other life but the clothes you stood up in. Elgin had insisted that you take nothing until the divorce settlement had been agreed. You asked him to divorce you for Adultery and he had insisted it was to be Unreasonable Behaviour. ‘It will help him to save face,’ you said. ‘Adultery is for cuckolds. Unreasonable Behaviour is for martyrs. A mad wife is better than a bad wife. What will he tell his friends?’

I'm no lawyer, but I don't think friends come into it. The law, as it stands, does not admit the concept of adultery between women. Probably because—like the law of rape—it is tied into strict definitions of penile penetration. No penis, no adultery. It doesn't help that for all the considerable explicitness of Written on the Body it never clearly describes the mechanics of the lovers' love-making. We never know whether it is orally, prosthetically or digitally penetrative; whether one partner takes an exclusively active, the other a passive role; whether it is confined to ecstatic fondling, kissing, smelling and tasting of each others' private parts. It is clearly not reticence on the part of Winterson, but something on the lines of Fats Waller's ‘if you have to ask you'll never know.’

Written on the Body comes to publication accompanied by notoriety that has nothing to do with its merits as a novel. Its main strength is the highly-coloured rhapsody in which the narrator expresses her love, interspersing it with broad comic streaks. The effect is Shakespearian (the Sonnets are frequently alluded to, so are the Song of Solomon and Casanovas' memoirs). Like Woolf's Orlando, Winterson's novel contains a wealth of fine writing. But again like Woolf's novel, it is tempting to see it as nothing more than a soggy valentine to the author's beloved; less a novel than a love letter. Another weakness in Written on the Body is its impoverished and formulaic plot. Girl meets married girl, girl falls in love with married girl, girl leaves her current girl (big rows), married girl contracts cancer (but, as in Love Story, the kind that lets you stay beautiful), girl gives up married girl (great suffering), married girl becomes divorced girl, girls united, girls happy ever after (or at least for as long as the remission lasts). Winterson's talents are probably better used in works like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with a strong story-line and a densely re-created social setting, or in highly-wrought literary exercises like Sexing the Cherry. This latest novel gives the impression of having been written too much from the heart.