'The 90s were a dark decade for me, in personal terms and in terms of the work I wanted to do,' says Winterson, who speaks of 'mental collapse' and 'self loathing'. In the view of the writer Michèle Roberts, her 'middle period was about art for art's sake, language for language's sake she became suspicious of storytelling'. Yet though she was still championed for her poetic language, and for novels of ideas that combined science and metaphysics with myth and quest, for others her work became precious, pretentious and self-indulgent. She was named among Granta's best young British novelists of 1993 and won a reputation, says her then publisher at Bloomsbury, Liz Calder, as 'one of the most talented of her generation'. Sexing the Cherry (1989), set in a fantastical 17th-century London, drew admiring comparisons with Jonathan Swift and Gabriel García Márquez. With The Passion (1987), praised by Edmund White as a Napoleonic-era 'fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness and androgynous ecstasy', Muriel Spark hailed her as a 'fresh voice with a mind behind it'. Gore Vidal pronounced her 'the most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years'. The novel drew on Winterson's Pentecostal evangelical upbringing in the north of England, and her rebellious love for another girl.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), written at 24, won the Whitbread first novel award, and her BBC TV screenplay in 1990 won a Bafta.

The perceived loss was considered the greater for her initial talent.

Oranges are not the only fruit feminism