Books: Of love and other demons

As models of creativity go, it's pretty much the Romantic one, which, she says, "allows free play amongst those chaotic and disturbing elements that are often lost in the personality and in the busy lives that we lead". It is clearly no picnic. "I go to my study and it's just awful," she confides. "You can sit there for hours at a time and produce nothing of any value and it all has to be thrown away... This isn't a real fire," she says, gesturing towards the flames flickering a few feet away from us, "but in the country all my fires are real, and I always have one at the ready... In a way I think anything that's good will return."

For this novel, she threw out 1,500 pages in order to reach the 200-odd that remain. She writes in her studio, "a big, open space with no books in it", and puts the sections in piles on the floor. "There might be 50 or more sections," she explains, "and then if I'm really cross I'll just shove them on top of each other. And then I have to read it all again... I read it obsessively and I read it out loud, and move the sections if I have to."

In Lighthousekeeping, as in all her work, love is the big theme, love that's as much about passionate engagement with the world as the solipsistic melding of one soul with another. Does she see herself as part of the Romantic tradition? "Yes, I do," she smiles, "and I think in a past life I was probably an 18th-century poet - maybe not a very good one, who wandered about being lovelorn under the window. I do," she adds, more seriously, "believe in the redeeming power of love, and I think it's a Romantic image, but it's also a religious idea that love is as strong as death."

She is, perhaps, a Romantic modernist, one who has in the past talked about being "the natural heir to Virginia Woolf". It's a position she now modifies: "I don't think that I'm the direct heir to Woolf or anything like that. I think I'm doing the work, or taking up some of the challenges, and I'm very excited by other writers who are doing it, too." Her measured response finally gives me the courage to ask about some of those tricky moments in the Winterson histoire, such as the time she named herself her favourite living author and nominated her own book as her Sunday Times book of the year.

She roars with laughter. "What did I say? Oh God! This is terrible! People behave like assholes and it's forgotten, but if you're a writer..." she tails off. "Tell me what I said and I can apologise!"

Alluding vaguely to "negative publicity", I ask if she has actually shifted her position. Or has she just become more circumspect? "I'm on a journey of my own," she says with a rueful smile. "After Written on the Body was published I went mad. I couldn't write, I couldn't do anything and that's when I left London. Everybody said we hate you and we hate your work, you're an arrogant bastard. But in America and Europe it was the book that completely changed my fortunes. So you've got completely conflicting information coming in. I was ski-ing downhill far too fast, and my skis were going apart. I used to dream this every night."