A Green Square by Jeanette Winterson (1998): A Review

Title: A Green Square

Book: The World and Other Places

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publication Year: 1998

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Genre: Short story, psychological fiction, postmodern allegory

Reading this collection has given me another reason to admire Winterson: her ability to inhabit narrators of different genders, sexualities, ages, and social backgrounds. She is not confined to one recognisable voice or one version of human loneliness. Whether her narrator is queer or straight, a woman or a man, she finds a way into the particular shape of their isolation.

In “A Green Square,” the narrator is a middle-aged husband and father standing at the edge of departure. He leaves his home one morning and realises that he has no desire to return. There is no dramatic argument, betrayal, or single catastrophe to explain his decision. That absence makes the story even bleaker. Nothing has suddenly gone wrong; everything has been quietly wrong for a long time. His domestic and professional life has become a closed circuit of responsibilities, habits, and repeated movements. He cannot imagine a meaningful future within it, yet the routines that suffocate him are also the only things holding his life together. They imprison him, but they also keep him from falling apart.

Have you ever felt an urgent need to leave everything behind and disappear permanently? This story inhabits that feeling without romanticising it. Escape may offer freedom, but it also strips away the structures that once provided safety, identity, and direction.

The narrator is caught between protection and freedom. Protection means returning to a life that has become emotionally dead. Freedom means entering uncertainty without knowing whether anything better exists beyond it.

“A Green Square” offers no comforting promise that abandoning everything will lead to happiness. It presents escape as both liberation and loss, and freedom as something frightening, solitary, and potentially destructive. Sometimes the desire to leave is not the beginning of an adventure. Sometimes it is what remains after hope has already gone.