Sexing the Cherry

Sexing the Cherry is a novel by the English writer Jeanette Winterson, published in 1989. It is set in seventeenth-century London.

The book follows a mother known as the Dog Woman and her protege, Jordan. Their journey takes place in a kind of space-time flux: across the seas in search of exotic fruits such as bananas and pineapples, and across time, with glimpses of the present and references to Charles I of England and to Oliver Cromwell.

The Dog Woman is grotesque in appearance. She is a giant, her skirt is big enough to serve a ship as a sail and she is strong enough to fling an elephant, and she is hideous as well, with smallpox scars that fleas live in, a flat nose and foul teeth. Her son is proud of her all the same, on the grounds that no other mother can hold a good dozen oranges in her mouth at once. What the two of them are ultimately looking for is the self.

The novel is a postmodernist work with a great deal of intertextuality, and it takes in the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, telling the princesses' individual stories in a way that gives them a voice and a determination that the traditional version does not allow.