The Passion Study Guide

Jeanette Winterson, born in 1959, was adopted in January 1960 by John William Winterson and Constance Winterson. During her childhood, she lived in Accrington, a former industrial town in Lancashire. She attended Elim Pentecostal Church services with her devout parents, who wanted her to become a missionary. At 16, Jeanette Winterson came out as a lesbian and left home. She studied English at Saint Catherine’s College, Oxford University—Saint Catherine’s had begun admitting women in 1974, not long before Winterson’s matriculation—while working a series of low-wage jobs to support herself. In 1985, she published her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl named Jeanette whose religious mother performs exorcisms on her when she experiences sexual attraction to another girl. Oranges won the Whitbread Award for First Novel (since renamed the Costa Book Awards). Her subsequent novel The Passion (1987) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize—a monetary prize for Commonwealth writers under 35. After publishing The Passion, Winterson began working full-time as an author. She has written not only novels for adults but also short story collections, essay collections, children’s books, and a memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (2011). She is currently a professor at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. 

The Passion takes place largely during and after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the name historians have given to successive military conflicts between France under the rule of dictator and subsequently emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). Napoleon, born in French-ruled Corsica and rising through the ranks of the French military during France’s Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), was elected “First Consul” of the French Republic in 1799. After several years of essentially dictatorial rule, Napoleon decided to make himself emperor and was crowned on December 2, 1804. In this same period, Napoleon’s army was fighting the first Napoleonic war, The War of the Third Coalition (1803–1806), against a group of allies including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Russia. During this period, Napoleon planned to invade England by sea from the French port of Boulogne (though his army ultimately never did so), a planning process represented in The Passion. The Passion also represents Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia, during which approximately one million people died—due not only to military action but also to starvation and hypothermia. Toward the novel’s end, its narrators briefly mention Napoleon’s political exile to the Italian island of Elba after he lost the War of the Sixth Coalition (1812–1814), his escape to France in February 1815, his subsequent exile to the British-controlled African island of Saint Helena in October 1815, and his death on Saint Helena in 1821. 

The Passion (1987) is a work of historical fiction that takes place during and after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Older works of historical fiction that represent the Napoleonic Wars famously include Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), which represents the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) ending the Napoleonic Wars, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), which represents Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia. Some critics consider The Passion to be more specifically a work of “historiographic metafiction,” a term referring to experimental historical novels that draw attention to their own artificiality, fictionality, and status as invented texts. Other works of historiographic metafiction include Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about World War II; John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (1976), about the Copernican revolution in science; and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), about slavery in the U.S. Finally, Jeanette Winterson herself has written several other experimental historical novels, such as Sexing the Cherry (1989), set in London during the 1600s but including elements of science fiction, and Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set partly in the early 1800s and partly in the present.