"I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks"
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A single swipe at "fluttering cloaks" is Winterson doing what she does best: puncturing the costume drama fantasy to defend a sharper idea of history. The phrase is funny because it’s so petty and specific. Not "bad research" or "anachronisms" - cloaks. Fabric. Stage business. She’s calling out a whole mode of historical fiction that treats the past as wardrobe: all atmosphere, no pressure.
The intent reads as aesthetic and political at once. "Historical novels" here aren’t just books set in another century; they’re a promise to make the past feel safely picturesque. The flutter implies movement without consequence, the emotional equivalent of wind machines on a set. Winterson’s dislike is really a refusal of nostalgia as a narrative drug. She’s suspicious of stories that turn history into escapism - especially the kind that reinscribes class and gender fantasies by fetishizing manners, silks, and silhouettes while laundering the messier realities underneath.
Subtext: she’s staking out her own territory against a mainstream tradition that often rewards "authentic" surface detail over deeper reinvention. Winterson’s fiction is famously elastic with time, myth, and identity; she’s less interested in reconstructing a period than in interrogating how we use the past to authorize the present. The cloak becomes shorthand for conventionality itself: the swish of expected plot beats, the comforting theater of heritage culture, the implication that history is something you can put on and take off.
Context matters, too. In a British literary landscape saturated with stately-home narratives and prestige adaptations, that little hate is a manifesto: don’t dress up history - argue with it.
The intent reads as aesthetic and political at once. "Historical novels" here aren’t just books set in another century; they’re a promise to make the past feel safely picturesque. The flutter implies movement without consequence, the emotional equivalent of wind machines on a set. Winterson’s dislike is really a refusal of nostalgia as a narrative drug. She’s suspicious of stories that turn history into escapism - especially the kind that reinscribes class and gender fantasies by fetishizing manners, silks, and silhouettes while laundering the messier realities underneath.
Subtext: she’s staking out her own territory against a mainstream tradition that often rewards "authentic" surface detail over deeper reinvention. Winterson’s fiction is famously elastic with time, myth, and identity; she’s less interested in reconstructing a period than in interrogating how we use the past to authorize the present. The cloak becomes shorthand for conventionality itself: the swish of expected plot beats, the comforting theater of heritage culture, the implication that history is something you can put on and take off.
Context matters, too. In a British literary landscape saturated with stately-home narratives and prestige adaptations, that little hate is a manifesto: don’t dress up history - argue with it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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