British novelist Jeanette Winterson is an out lesbian who has earned much success and acclaim within the worlds of literature, television, theater — and organic groceries. Yes, the woman who is best known for her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit even deals in organic groceries. Her small London shop, Verde's, offers a personal alternative to the supermarkets of today. Her most recent novel, Tanglewreck, explores a world of children's fantasy and time travel — a far cry from the lesbian-themed literature that she is primarily known for.

Born in Manchester, England, Winterson was adopted by Pentecostal parents who hoped that she would one day become a missionary. And growing up in a Northern England household that only had six books, one of which was the Bible, it seemed unlikely that Winterson would one day become an author.

But her “life quest” for reading and writing started when she found a copy of Malory's Morte d'Arthur. A young Winterson made the best of not having an indoor bathroom by secretly reading by flashlight in her family's outhouse.

At 16, Winterson left home after announcing she was in love with another girl and journeyed to London. In a 2004 profile in the British newspaper The Guardian, Winterson described falling in love and leaving home as “an extraordinary self-awakening, specially if you have a romantic temperament, as I do.”

To maintain her new life in London, Winterson took several odd jobs and even worked as maid in an insane asylum. Eventually, Winterson's love for writing won out, and she went on to earn a degree in English from Oxford University.

Winterson found success almost immediately with the publication of her semi-autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The book, which Winterson wrote when she was 23 and saw published only a year later in 1985, tells the story of a young girl coming to terms with her sexuality. Much like Winterson, the novel's main character, Jeanette, is raised by a religious family and must try to reconcile her religion with her attraction to other women.

Although the story of a young girl falling in love with another girl and leaving home is nearly identical to Winterson's life, she warns that it is not appropriate to automatically assume that Oranges is a blow-by-blow recounting of her experiences.

“I wouldn't believe that Oranges is my life if I were you,” Winterson said to Salon.com in 1997. “I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did. And it has caused a great deal of confusion. I mean, of course the basics are in place, but there is as much of me and my life in every one of my books, as there is in Oranges.”

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a first novel, and soon afterward, American author Gore Vidal pronounced Winterson “the most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.”

Winterson later adapted her novel into a script for a BBC miniseries that aired in 1990. The television version of Oranges won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best drama, the Prix D'Argent at the Cannes Film Festival for best script, and several other awards.

Inevitably, Winterson soon found herself with quite a lesbian following. In The Guardian's profile of Winterson, Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet, claims that in the 1980s there was a “hunger for ambitious writing that was also incidentally about passion between women,” so Winterson's Oranges definitely had an audience.

“[Other lesbian characters] ended up committing suicide at worst or getting married at best; we were always pathologised. But in Oranges it was the people who had problems with lesbianism who were the freaks,” Waters said, comparing Oranges to other novels with lesbian characters.

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