24/01/2026
Jeanette Winterson once suggested that the worst regrets do not come from thinking badly but from feeling too little, or too late, or in the wrong direction. The line appears in Written on the Body* her 1992 novel about a love affair that is at once ecstatic and quietly ruinous. The book never names the narrator’s gender, which was a small shock at the time and remains a gentle provocation now. Winterson was not playing a trick so much as clearing space. She wanted to write about desire without the usual scaffolding of roles and expectations, to see what would happen if feeling itself were allowed to lead.
The distinction the quote draws between judgement and feeling sounds simple until it lands. Judgement is tidy. It belongs to the part of us that weighs options, scans for consequences, and imagines future selves who will approve of our choices. Feeling is messier. It does not wait its turn. It arrives early, sometimes uninvited, sometimes long after the moment has passed. When Winterson suggests that her deepest regrets came from failures of feeling rather than errors of judgement, she is pointing toward a different moral economy. The damage was not done because the mind miscalculated. It was done because the heart held back, or shut down, or refused to risk the embarrassment of sincerity.
This idea carries particular force in Written on the Body, a novel obsessed with the physical fact of love. The narrator catalogs the beloved’s body with the precision of a medical text, not to objectify it but to insist that love is not an abstraction. It lives in skin, breath, illness, and time. Against this backdrop, a failure of feeling is not about being irrational. It is about refusing to inhabit one’s own sensations fully, about keeping emotion at a polite distance. The tragedy of the book is not that the lovers think badly. It is that they do not trust what they already know in their bones.
Winterson’s own life helps explain why this distinction mattered to her. Born in Manchester in 1959 and adopted into a strict Pentecostal household, she grew up in a world suspicious of desire and allergic to ambiguity. She left home as a teenager, educated herself with borrowed books, and eventually read English at Oxford. From her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she wrote against the idea that emotional truth should be flattened to fit doctrine or common sense. Her work often argues with systems that prize certainty over intimacy, whether religious, social, or literary. Feeling, in her books, is not indulgence. It is a form of knowledge that has been historically discounted, especially when it comes from women or refuses neat labels.
Culturally, the line still unsettles because it cuts against a familiar story we tell about maturity. We like to believe that wisdom comes from better thinking, clearer plans, smarter boundaries. Emotional restraint is often praised as strength. Yet many people reach middle age not haunted by wild decisions but by moments when they did not say the thing, make the call, or admit the attachment that was already shaping their days. The regret has a different texture. It is quieter, harder to defend against, because it cannot be blamed on ignorance. It feels more like a self-betrayal.
Psychologically, Winterson’s insight brushes up against what we now understand about emotional avoidance. Avoiding feeling can look like reasonableness. It can masquerade as patience or pragmatism. But it often carries a cost. Suppressed emotion does not vanish. It reappears as numbness, as delayed grief, as a vague sense of having missed one’s own life. The failures she points to are not melodramatic implosions. They are small refusals to stay present when presence mattered.
The line also has a gendered undertone that remains relevant. Women have long been told that their feelings are excessive, unreliable, or dangerous. To admit regret rooted in insufficient feeling rather than poor judgement quietly flips that script. It suggests that the problem was not too much emotion but too little permission to trust it. In recent years, thinkers like Maggie Nelson and writers working at the edge of memoir and criticism have carried this forward, insisting that emotional experience can be rigorous without becoming rigid.
One reason the sentence lingers is its humility. It does not glamorize passion or excuse harm done in its name. It simply notices something uncomfortable. Many of the moments we wish we could redo did not require better intelligence. They required more courage to feel what was already there. Anyone who has stood in a hallway after a conversation ended, noticing the faint hum of the lights and the weight of what went unsaid, recognizes the shape of that regret.
Jeanette Winterson has never been an easy figure. She has faced criticism for her public persona and for how she tells her own story, particularly in later memoirs. Yet the consistency of her concern is hard to miss. Across decades of work, she keeps returning to the question of what it costs to live at a remove from one’s own emotional life. The answer, suggested quietly in that line from Written on the Body, is not chaos or heartbreak alone. It is a subtler loss, the sense that judgement stayed intact while something more vital was left unattended.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: University of Salford Press Office
