This whole collection is characteristic for its close relationship with Winterson’s novels. Typically for Winter-son, love in the fi rst is frightening and risky and introduces the reader to one of Winterson’s dominating concerns: that loving is about taking a chance. Both the fi rst and last stories are concerned with loving a pet and therefore explicitly frame the collection. Psalms is the unfortunate pet tortoise (who is named, on the mother’s insistence, after a book of the Bible) who drowns while the family is on holiday in Blackpool.
This is particularly true of the last story, “Psalms,” in which the child narrator and her evangelical mother are replicas of the characters in the novel. There is a pathos invested in many of these stories, but there is also a glimpse of the humor of Oranges. In the afterword of the 1998 edition, Winterson explains how she wrote these 17 stories gradually over 12 years, after the publication of her fi rst novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The World and Other Places is, to date, Jeanette Winterson’s only short story collection. Analysis of Jeanette Winterson’s The World and Other Places
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