CANR

• Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving Sandstone Press (Inverness, Scotland), 2020

1. Negative capability : a diary of surviving LCCN 2020416926 Type of material Book Personal name Roberts, Michèle, author. Main title Negative capability : a diary of surviving / Michèle Roberts. Published/Produced Inverness, Scotland : Sandstone Press, [2020] Description 262 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781913207519 Paperback 9781913207144 hardback 1913207145 hardback 191320751X 9781913207519 CALL NUMBER PR6068.O155 Z46 2020 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Cut Out - 2022 Sandstone Press, North Ayrshire, Scotland
• Colette: My Literary Mother (My Reading) - 2024 Oxford University Press , Oxford, United Kingdom

• Wikipedia -

  Michèle Roberts

  Article
  Talk
  Read
  Edit
  View history

  Tools
  Appearance hide
  Text

  Small

  Standard

  Large
  Width

  Standard

  Wide
  Color (beta)

  Automatic

  Light

  Dark
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Michèle Roberts
  FRSL
  Born Michèle Brigitte Roberts
  20 May 1949 (age 75)
  Bushey, Hertfordshire, England
  Education Somerville College, Oxford
  University College London
  Occupation(s) Novelist and poet
  Notable work Daughters of the House (1992)
  Awards WH Smith Literary Award
  Website www.micheleroberts.co.uk
  Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL (born 20 May 1949) is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother (Monique Caulle) and English Protestant father (Reginald Roberts), and has dual UK–France nationality.

  Early life
  Roberts was born to a French Catholic mother and English Protestant father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England,[1] but was raised in Edgware, Middlesex. She was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith.[2] She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian. She worked for the British Council in Bangkok, Thailand, in this role from 1973 to 1974.

  Career
  Active in socialist and feminist politics (the Women's Liberation Movement) since the early 1970s, she formed a writers' collective with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns. At this time, Roberts was the Poetry Editor (1975–77) at Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, and later at City Limits (1981–83). Her first novel, A Piece of the Night, was published in 1978. Her 1992 novel Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,[3] and won the 1993 WH Smith Literary Award.[4]

  Paper Houses, a memoir of her life since 1970, was published in 2007: "Drawing on her diaries of the period, she brings back a more political, though also hedonistic era of radical feminism, communes and demonstrations. And the friendships she made and has kept ever since, notably with fellow feminist writers such as Sara Maitland, Micheline Wandor and Alison Fell. Roberts also self-analyzes the effects of her Anglo-French family’s Catholicism ('the nun in my head, that monstrous Mother Superior'), which have remained a fertile source, even as she reacted against its overt doctrines. Her exploration of London, the various areas and houses that she lived in, went alongside her development as a writer. For her, writing 'meant voyaging into the unknown and having adventures' though also 'bearing witness to other people’s stories as well as my own'."[5]

  In her 2020 work, Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving, Roberts documents a period of crisis following the rejection of a novel she was writing by her publisher and agent. The title is taken from a quotation by Keats.[6]

  Roberts is an Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and was visiting professor in Writing at Nottingham Trent University for several years.

  Honours and recognition
  Roberts was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.[7] She is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French government, but turned down an OBE as a consequence of her republican views.[8]

  Publications
  Essays
  Food, Sex & God: on Inspiration and Writing, 1988, Virago Press
  Novels
  A Piece of the Night, 1978, Women's Press
  The Visitation, 1983, Women's Press
  The Wild Girl (also known as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene), 1984, Methuen
  The Book of Mrs Noah, 1987, Methuen
  In the Red Kitchen, 1990, Methuen
  Daughters of the House, 1992, Virago and Morrow (USA)
  Flesh & Blood, 1994, Virago
  Impossible Saints, 1998, Ecco Press
  Fair Exchange, 1999, Little, Brown
  The Looking Glass, 2000, Little, Brown
  The Mistressclass, 2002, Little, Brown
  Reader, I Married Him, 2006, Little, Brown
  Ignorance, 2012, Bloomsbury Publishing[9]
  The Walworth Beauty, 2017, Bloomsbury
  Cut Out, 2021, Sandstone Press, ISBN 978-1913207472
  Poetry
  Touch Papers: Three Women Poets (with Michelene Wandor and Judith Kazantzis), 1982, Allison and Busby
  The Mirror of the Mother, 1986, Methuen
  Psyche and the Hurricane , 1991, Methuen
  All the Selves I Was, 1995, Virago
  Short stories
  Your Shoes, 1991[10]
  During Mother's Absence, 1993, Virago
  Playing Sardines, 2001, Virago
  Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, 2010, Virago
  Memoir
  Paper Houses: A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond, 2007, Virago, ISBN 978-1844084074; paperback 2008, ISBN 978-1844084081
  Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving, 2020, Sandstone Press, ISBN 978-1913207144
  Bibliography
  Maria Soraya García-Sánchez: Travelling in Women's History with Michèle Roberts's Novels: Literature, Language and Culture. Bern: Lang, 2011, ISBN 978-3-0343-0627-0
  Susanne Gruss: The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, ISBN 978-90-420-2531-8
  Nick Rennison: Contemporary British Novelists. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2005, ISBN 0-415-21708-3, p. 137–140.

• Michèle Roberts website - http://www.micheleroberts.co.uk/

  Photo of Michèle Roberts
  Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud- stories of sex and love (2010). Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

  I was born in 1949, twenty minutes after my twin sister Marguerite, to a French mother and an English father. I grew up in Edgware, a suburb of north-west London. My sisters and I attended two local convent schools. Summer holidays were spent at the house of our French grandparents in Normandy, near Etretat in the Pays de Caux.

  I read for a B.A. in English Language and Literature at Somerville, Oxford. In those days this was a women's college: the majority of Oxford colleges did not accept women. Next, I spent two years studying to become a librarian. I knew I wanted to write but knew, too, how important it was to be able to support myself. I spent a year working for the British Council in South-East Asia. The Vietnam War was devastating the area. I gave up my job and went travelling instead.

  After this I gave up any idea of working as a librarian and began earning my living from a variety of part-time jobs. Often I wrote at night. I got involved in a writers' group, writing short stories, and worked on my first novel, A Piece of the Night, which came out in 1978. It's always been important to me to be financially independent, and I've worked as a hospital cleaner, temp secretary, clerk, teacher, journalist, reviewer and critic.

  Life as a writer was very hard at first. Still, a chosen poverty is easier to bear than the enforced sort. When Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and won the W.H.Smith Literary Award in 1993, I started making more money, and could finally give up the part-time jobs.

  I've lived in many different places, including Italy and North America, but at the age of forty-four I bought my first home: a small house in France. At the moment I live in both France and England, moving back and forth between the two, and also spend some time at the University of East Anglia, where I am currently Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing.

  Recently I turned down an O.B.E. because I am a republican, but I was honoured to be made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and The Society of Authors. As well as writing, I serve as a judge for literary prizes, have presented radio arts programmes such as Night Waves, have chaired the British Council's Literature Advisory Committee, and have travelled abroad extensively with other writers on tours organised by the British Council.

  I have been married twice, have two stepsons, am close to my nieces and nephews, and spend as much time as possible with my friends. Friends are crucial, a source of great pleasure. As a writer I need a great deal of solitude but in the evenings I like to get out and have a good time.

  Q. What do you write about?
  A. Food, sex, saints, death, love, memory, desire, power relationships, perversity; whatever obsesses me at a given time.

  Q. How do you know what you want to write about?
  A. I become haunted by it. I dream about it. A novel erupts from a visual image, often a dream image, often an image of a dead body.

  Q. What kind of books do you write?
  A. Mainly novels, poems, short stories, though I have also written two plays and one film. I am fascinated by the difference between forms. I have written a novel (Flesh and Blood) composed of short stories (all broken in half) and I have written a short story (in Playing Sardines) that in effect is a novel. Form is the crucial thing. Once you've got an idea of the form a novel will take, why it needs a particular narrative perspective, then you can get going.

  Q. Do you use a computer?
  A. Everything begins as ink scribble in the notebook I carry. At some point these handwritten notes for a story or novel transfer onto the computer. Up until then you can pretend you're not doing it, so that the process is unselfconscious and unanxious. Once I've properly begun, I enjoy the process of editing on screen. I print out at night what I've written during the day, because I like reading hard copy and can scribble corrections on it more easily. Poetry, however, I write in longhand on big sheets of paper. I write these out over and over, twenty versions perhaps, the poem growing a bit more each time, until it's done. I redraft a great deal. That's what writing means: rewriting.

  Q. Why did you want to write?
  A. Growing up bilingual, in a French-English family, I was fascinated by language and by language translating itself back and forth. Also, I wrote to invent a culture, a world, I could belong in. Catholicism was a misogynistic religion and I needed to write my way out of it. In the process, I discovered the power of making shapes with words, making new realities. My father wrote short stories, which were never published; he inspired me. My English grandmother was a great storyteller; she inspired me too. And of course Catholicism, I realised, was a great treasure trove of stories which I could re-tell. I wanted to smash up the old stories, which I felt had damaged me, and make something new with them. Omniscient narrators such as God the Father and the Pope had snared me as an object in their stories; I needed to write women in as our own subjects. Struggling heroes of our own stories. I needed a narrative perspective from down here on the ground, not up there in the sky, and I needed to create different, clashing narrative perspectives, to expose how we quarrel over what is true, what happens. I don't believe any longer in one truth. That's for religion, not for novelists. Now I think I write for other reasons too: to converse with the reader, play with and tease the reader, with luck please the reader in the end.

  Q. Who or what is your muse?
  A. My mother was for a long time. My father was the muse for one book (Impossible Saints). I've written books inspired by whomever I was in love with at the time. The lover, or the fantasy lover, becomes the muse for that particular book. The book then becomes the gift to the lover.

  Q. What is your advice to young writers?
  A. Don't give up.

• Aesthetica - https://aestheticamagazine.com/michele-roberts/

  Q&A

  I know that you’ve had a prolific career; can you tell me more about yourself and how it all started?
  I loved writing all through primary school. Also I wrote a diary. My first very short novel, written when I was about eight, featured an evil aristocrat called Sir Cuthbert prowling along a beach on a dark and stormy night, and being struck dead by thunder and lightning. I was an avid reader, a dreamer, and lived inside my imagination a lot, so it seemed natural to want to create my own fictional worlds. Writing seemed as necessary as breathing. I connect those early poems to my struggle towards individuation. The desire to publish surfaced when I was in my early 20s. It seemed very cheeky, but I was ambitious and determined. I joined a writers’ group, which was like serving an apprenticeship, and that spurred me on.

  Your fiction has an absolute focus on detail, for example in Colette Looks Back you say, “I was a meadow of dried cut grass and she raked me up and I snapped back.” Can you tell me about your use of language?
  This sentence is a direct homage to Colette, because somewhere, in one of her novels, she tries to capture the sound that raking grass makes. Does she compare it to combing hair? I can’t remember. What I learned from Colette was the importance of sensual imagery in writing, in order to anchor events in an imagined reality, also in order to demonstrate emotion and relationships. Here, in my story about Colette, the mother and daughter are playing a tug of war. The mother is loving and possessive and the daughter yearns to get free. The mother thinks her daughter is her own bit of nature, like a pasture laid to grass, while the daughter doesn’t want to be an object but a subject. My story nods towards the tale of Rapunzel, in which the daughter learns to use her hair for her own purposes.

  How does Mud differ or relate to some of your previous works?
  I’ve always loved writing short stories. They seem like poems, in that they may work through metaphor at some level, may connect two disparate images. The narrative weaves the images together, makes a pattern with them. The action of the story may be about human beings but it is also this ravelling of images. All my fiction is written out of parts of myself I don’t know about, about desires or fears not yet realised. You project these outside yourself, find an objective correlative, a person or an image, and start writing into the unknown. I’ve written novels built out of short stories, for example Impossible Saints and Flesh and Blood, so I see short stories as whole in themselves and also as building blocks in larger works.

  You write novels, short stories, poems and essays, which genre do you connect with the most and why?
  I started out as a poet, and still love writing poetry. Thinking through metaphor feels truthful, connecting body to world, and informs all my work, so poetry seems to be the deep inspiring form for me. The great challenge of writing a novel is to find a narrative perspective, to find or invent a form that expresses the content. There’s a joy in spending two years working on an extended piece, which you know is going to turn into a novel. I think a novel conveys in itself, in its form, the thought processes that went into its making. Just occasionally I need to write an essay, to puzzle out some aspect of the creative process. At the moment, I recognise how much I love writing short stories. You can write a story in a week. There’s a pleasure in being quick, and a pleasure in being slow. Rather like making love. Depends on the mood you’re in.

  In the USA, there’s an ingrained sense of the short story with a strong tradition of literary magazines and creative writing programmes at universities, how do you feel the short story fits within the context of literature in the UK?
  The received wisdom among British publishers has been that short stories don’t sell well. We’ve certainly had fewer outlets for stories than is the case in the States. I think a revival is happening now, with more magazines and newspapers being prepared to publish stories, more short story competitions, more stories being commissioned for radio, and of course far more work being made available via the internet. I think short stories, flash fictions, suit the fractured, interrupted, speedy sort of life many people lead.

  How does your dual nationality, being both French and English influence your writing?
  Growing up hearing two languages spoken at home helped turn me into a writer because it meant I was aware of language from a very early age, rather than taking it for granted. I sometimes use French grammatical structures in my prose, so I’m aware of a richness of options from which to choose. I read English at university, but I read medieval French romances and poetry too, so was grateful for both literary traditions. I love slang and am fascinated by French slang and how to translate it into English.

  Can you give me an idea of your writing process?
  Something bothers me so much I have to start writing about it; the grit in the oyster you hope will turn into a pearl. Or two very different, completely disconnected images will suddenly bump up against each other, and suggest a relationship to be worked out through a narrative. Sometimes an image will turn up in a dream and I’ll get going. I don’t write naturalism. I write about reality as being the play of the unconscious and conscious minds, people’s inner worlds mapped onto the outer world and the outer world affecting the inner world. I write every morning for several hours, and I re-write until something is as right as I can get it. You end up feeling you’re combing the sandy beach with a very fine tiny comb.

  How did it feel when you started to make a career out of your vocation?
  I used to annoy my friends by neurotically saying, each time I had a book published: d’you think I’m a real writer at last now? They would yell at me to shut up. I was very poor for a long time, a chosen poverty, which is of course more bearable than an imposed poverty, and was often homeless, moving from one collective house to another, but managed to hold on. You have to sustain your vocation by being utterly committed. When I won a literary award in 1993 for Daughters of the House I was delighted. The next neurotic fear was would I be able to go on producing good work?

  Which authors influence you and where do you draw inspiration from?
  I am inspired by the classic French writers, such as George Sand, Flaubert, Mallarme and Simone de Beauvoir. Charlotte Brontë was an early inspiration, the poets John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the European and American modernist writers. Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison blew my mind. My English grandmother also inspired me. She had little formal education but was a brilliant oral poet, making up rude bawdy stories in rhyme. She made me see that language could be exciting, dirty, sensual, dangerous, powerful and subversive.

• Wild Woman Writing Club - https://wildwomanwritingclub.wordpress.com/2020/12/04/an-interview-with-author-michele-roberts/

  An interview with author Michele Roberts
  Posted on December 4, 2020 by flow
  Under normal circumstances, I would have met the novelist and poet Michele Roberts in a cafe to talk about her most recent book, Negative Capability: a Diary of Surviving. Thanks to Covid, however, we are all confined to our cells. Michele speaks quickly and without hesitation, and is so articulate that she could be dictating a book. She is also immensely warm, generous, and easy to talk to.

  I ask her how she is finding Lockdown 2, and get a window into what an overabundance of solitude looks like. For me, it is a luxury in short supply. I nearly suggest a temporary life-swap. We begin to talk about the act of writing as an escape from our current living conditions.

  “The world of the imagination is one I live in while writing. Psychologists call it flow. The flow of language and writing happens, then the next day you discover it was all just the prison of the ego. I can escape by writing in the morning but I can’t write all day.”

  Her outlet is to go outdoors for “angry gardening.” The rose bushes need attention. It strikes me that this is a good strategy, and that I should tear myself away from screens to put my own garden in order.

  I ask Michele why she chose to make Walworth her home. She says that she had lived in London since the 1970s, living all over the city in various shared houses, in a “semi-squat,” sometimes with her partners. In the early days she lived hand-to-mouth, but more recently she had been living in a 70s block on the river Thames, opposite Tate Modern, in a studio flat.

  “I wanted more room and I did desperately want a garden. I knew I liked south east London and that it was affordable. There’s something about this area, it’s got soul, it’s gutsy, there are great people living all around. East Street market is still open, the crowds thronging without wearing a mask. They’re part of the street scene. In Burgess Park you can twist and twirl and connect up with other green patches. There’s the old canal going through the park. We cherish our parks, as Londoners.”

  Negative Capability is a diary of a difficult period in Roberts’ life. Her fiction manuscript wasn’t gaining traction. The connection was not being made. Money was tight. Her future depended on making a success of the novel, but the planets were not aligned. So, she decided to keep a diary of everything happening in the life of her mind and body. I am reminded of Michele de Montaigne, an unsparing scrutiniser of his mundane existence. I ask her why autofiction is having such a cultural moment.

  She says the book is “not fiction at all. There are 12 chapters, in which nothing is invented. When you write a diary your mind is under pressure from memory, from dreams, from how you’re feeling that day. It’s memoir, or diary. But we are in an age where the genres blur and overlap. Everything bleeds into everything else. There are memoirs which are clearly a bit fictionalised, and shaped in a way life isn’t, because it’s messy. There is fiction which is first-person and sounds likes memoir, in which case the author has to let us know whether it’s close to life.”

  “If you hop backwards to when I was a young writer, there was a great debate which went on. In the 1970s, women writing about the lives of women were despised by a male literary establishment. They would say ‘it’s autobiography, it’s no good, it’s just women weeping from their wounds, bleeding gently all over the page.’ There was enormous contempt for it. ‘Real fictional writing’ was held to be done by men who could imagine things far away; they could imagine jumping in a rocket and going to the moon, and that was a real novel, whereas something on earth by the kitchen sink—wasn’t.”

  “The great wave of feminist cultural activity changed the landscape forever. The feminist literary ‘great flowering’ made women feel that they could tell whatever stories they wanted. Some of them wrote wonderful science fiction, some wrote domestic realism, some chose fantasy, or the historical novel. So, in the context of that great flowering of women’s writing, that tradition, young women of the latest generation of writers want to write fiction in the first person which sounds chatty and vernacular. The best of those are so well crafted you don’t notice the craft. They sound simple, almost naive, but actually they’re very well done. Others I don’t rate so highly because they’re too close to journalism, saying ‘what a horrible time I had with my ex-boyfriend,’ and they don’t interest me as much.”

  I suggest that the male critics of the 70s were reserving the novel for masculine objectivity, as they saw it.

  “Yes, and to be funny in a particularly masculine way, with great stress on coolness, irony, and detachment. They had a lot of style, it was fantastic writing. Whatever you think of Martin Amis’ content, he’s a fantastic stylist. That was the template, and it was a great struggle for women writers to pit ourselves against these male norms and find another way to write, but we did. We succeeded.”

  I remark that it’s all pushing through the surface again, quite suddenly, the legacy of female authorship informed by second wave feminism. It broke through from discussions in the feminist hinterlands with Olivia Laing’s review of a reissued collection of essays by Andrea Dworkin. Laing describes the process as returning to the “contested ground” of radical feminism.

  Michele says “your generation of young women are making your own version of feminism, it’s exciting.”

  I say that I want to talk to as many older women writers as possible, as a from of anti-erasure, to keep clear the lines of connection between the generations. It is a foil to a literary culture which tends to lionise debut authors at the expense of those whose work has matured, as they have spent longer being human.

  Michele thinks this is “a wonderful mission.” When you spend a lot of time arguing, contesting, and railing, it is consoling to agree, and to be understood without having to explain.

  Roberts writes in Negative Capability that Simone de Beauvoir is her touchstone. From the French writer, she gained her idea of the independent woman, took it, and ran with it. She does not appear to have doubted herself for a moment. In her twenties, in the 70s, Roberts was living in collective housing.

  “It was all very rough and ready, sleeping in someone’s spare room then moving on. It was hand to mouth, but I didn’t mind. I chose to be a writer, so I knew I would be poor. It’s different to poverty forced upon you. Mine was a chosen poverty. I was willing to accept that I wasn’t going to live in a nice house. I didn’t want it to be tough, but I was brave. You have reserves of strength when you’re young. I call it bloody-mindedness.”

  I suggest that she is a difficult woman. She asks me what I mean. I say that difficult women get their teeth into something valuable. Life wants to jostle them down a narrow path, but they hold onto a golden vision which is their due north.

  “Ah you mean in the sense of Helen Lewis’ book. The world hasn’t always looked kindly on such women as we are a nuisance, and that’s good. Being part of Women’s Lib made a huge difference to me. We called each other sisters; even though you had difficult relationships, power struggles, different opinions—it wasn’t all ‘dancing in the dew’ idealism. The great thing was the solidarity among women. That gave us strength.”

  “In our day, women are taught to see themselves as individuals, that it’s your fault if you don’t succeed. We are talking about something different, which is wanting to change the world to make it better for women. That means collaborating and having an international view of thing. Feminism for me has never been about just making it myself. That’s not feminism. It’s about all of us linked together.”

  She writes beautifully about her gang of female friends. I ask whether her friendship group is something she took away from women’s lib.

  “Yes, my lovely strong web of women friends. We are all in our ways feminists, very different people. Many of us are writers. The group is feminist in that we support each other all the time to express what’s gone wrong, to talk about difficulties, challenges. We don’t start a conversation by talking about each other’s kids or grandkids. We are interested in each other’s lives as women, not as defined by our roles. We talk about books we read, or a ghastly publisher. We joke. I love that. The women I love have remained themselves, and they’re very wide and big because a lot is going on with them. That could be true of someone who is writing.”

  I suggest that wideness is characteristic of women who are writers and artists, that it’s easy, when you’re a mum, to lose yourself in the busyness of the role. As motherhood is what you have in common with women you know locally, you draw on that common experience, but it doesn’t necessarily make for deeper friendships.

  “What’s so lovely is that the 1970s wave was started by young mothers with children. There was this caricature of the man-hating hairy-legged feminist, but it was actually ardent, beautiful young women with kids desperate to be in contact with the world, not stuck in little boxes in the suburbs. There is nothing wrong with the suburbs, of course. One artistic practice was a collective of trained artists, who were then at home with children. They made art which they circulated in matchboxes, and kept circulating them by post, which was wonderful. I admire women artists at home with kids because they’re inventive; they find ways to keep it alive.”

  “Sorry if I sound nostalgic, but in the early days of women’s lib women took their kids with them. You’d stick your toddler in a buggy and go off to join a demo or meeting. There wasn’t the same stress as there is now on being a domestic goddess at home with your crochet making, your tye-dye bedsheets and so on. Now there is much more stress on bourgeois home-making. Our meetings were full of babies and children. It was jolly noisy. Those days are gone. I’m interested to know how women are managing now—some are working outside the home, some at home—and what their blokes are like, because there has been a big change around fathers. They seem to do much more now.”

  I ask Michele about the overlap between consciousness raising and writing fiction, and which writers among her contemporaries were most important to her.

  “I was invited to join a group of feminist writers in the mid-70s. We taught each other. Some women were more experienced than others. I was a raw newbie, but I learned fast. We produced a book of short stories together. Read my book Paper Houses which described those years. I was so very lucky with that group. We urged each other on, and encouraged each other. It was a fantastic experience. It really helped.”

  “I ended up as a fill-in typist for Time Out. I met people on the staff who were countercultural and feminist, lots of nice blokes too. I got a job as poetry editor, so I met other writers that way. I also had a friend, Sarah Lean, who is a writer and still a close friend. We egged each other on, reading Marx and Freud over a few glasses of wine. We showed each other our work, being encouraging but also being able to be critical was crucial.”

  We talk about how women are establishing new publications such as The Radical Notion, about the need for a new women’s press. Then, I broach the question of catholicism in Michele’s writing, asking whether being raised catholic shaped the kind of feminist she became, as much as reading Simone de Beauvoir.

  “Spot on,” she says, “because I grew up in a catholic ghetto in north west London, a ferociously catholic little bubble, with very old-fashioned Fransiscan nuns at my convent school, and horrendous priests ranting at us in church. My mum’s catholicism was cultural, so it was woven in with being French. It was part of everyday life, more friendly, to do with food, processions and lovely singing in church; whereas the English catholicism was rigid, authoritarian, and I really took against it although I wanted to be a nun and was keen on god. I stopped wanting that once I went to university because I wanted to read books and stay up all night in the library. It was clear that was the place, not the church. But I think the authoritarianism of male priests made me a feminist—I saw the church as misogynist in its’ theology. To this day I have a loathing of any man who lays down the law from a pulpit, or at a dinner table, or who tries to tell women—to tell me—what to do. That will never leave me. It’s part of who I am. Part of my feminism is that I will not put up with men telling me what to think. I’ve got many men friends, and I love them dearly, and can listen to them if they talk to me in a way that means they can be listened to. I’m friends with men who are artists, doctors, and unemployed. But anyone who started to lecture me I want to punch them. I have an anger about the damage that catholicism did to me, preaching to us that women’s bodies were a source of shame, that it meant you were impure and could never really know god except through the medium of a male priest. That was the message. That’s what the Catholic church was teaching little girls and it was a disgusting thing to do. I think the church hates women, actually. And yet my feminism is also involved with taking the stories of the bible, old and new, and retelling them. I re-told the Mary Magdelen story way back in 1984; I retold Mrs Noah in 1986. I love catholic folklore. It’s part of the childhood treasure trove of reading and stories and music and art, and I don’t want to give that up. So there is a beautiful side of catholicism which is the artists’ & writers’ & musicians’, which I cherish. Its the male priests I can’t stand.”

  “When I was younger there was a vey strong christian feminist movement. It was very interesting to know those women. I wasn’t part of it as I was apostate, like you, but I write literary reviews occasionally for The Tablet, and I’m quite interested to track what’s happening in the church, like the report today saying that the church failed through the Archbishop to protect abused children. I go on being interested in the church as an institute of power, in what it does in the world, but I can’t stand the Pope who goes around being lovely about poor people but doesn’t let women become priests.”

  We talk about reading Mary Daly, and how her work cracked the code of patriarchal religion to establish a parallel feminist tradition which has the moral force of a religion in its own right. We talk about how little known she is, outside of small feminist circles.

  “It’s down to the amazing power the media has to suppress voices, to deny, ignore, to jeer at them. Such mockery was aimed at feminism, and people just soaked it up without realising how damaging it was.”

  I recall getting past all the misrepresentations of Andrea Dworkin to actually read some of her work. The cultural warnings, the smears and slurs are so effective that you have to be fairly intrepid to get past them. The categories have their limits, she says, but the radical analysis retains its power.

  “I think I was a radical feminist, and a socialist feminist, and an independent feminist, and an ex-catholic kind of feminist, and a sort-of heterosexual feminist. The categories hardly existed back then, but we kept trying to have them because that’s what people in politics do. It really is so slippery, women’s lib. Who you are from day to day, the kind of feminist you are, changes all the time. Radical feminism spoke to me very strongly because it referred to something that was true. Women were the first sex; we were oppressed; men had political power; there was patriarchy, and fighting against it was crucial. And I had to be a socialist feminist because it was clear that women’s lives were linked worldwide by structures of power and I couldn’t think about fighting the Patriarchy without thinking about money and how it is circulated. I do think radical feminism is a great jet of energy which constantly replenishes us, and we need it. It’s almost like someone turning a hose on you. Whenever I get a bit cosy, or pompous, or sentimental, or any of the things I can so often be, I have to turn the hose on myself.”

  This provokes another belly laugh for us both. We laughed a lot during our conversation. I agree with her that sentimentality is the enemy.

  “If you read Charlotte Bronte on that, she’s good because she showed how, in her day, it was linked to notions of piety which were hypocritical. There is an untruth in it. It’s an excess. Love, for example, means knowing the other person, perhaps desiring them, appreciating them, wanting to help them, to go to bed with them, to listen to them, stroke them, but also know them, which means it’s very hard to do. You have to know them, know their flaws, which means revealing your flaws. Sentimentality wipes out all that complexity. Maybe that’s what it does. It oversimplifies. It all gets a bit soggy, somehow.”

  I suggest that sentimentality gets rid of all the shadows, flattening perspective. Michele suggests it leads to bad art, which leads us seamlessly onto Maggie Hambling’s sculpture in honour of Mary Wollstonecraft, which was unveiled to the public a few days previously.

  “[Hambling] said in today’s Guardian that it’s ‘of everywoman,’ but that’s so stupid. I don’t like Hambling’s work, I might as well say so. I think she was the wrong choice. I’m not saying I wanted brutal neo-realism in shiny bronze—which is the fashionable mode isn’t it, for public statues. There are bad ones all over the place.”

  I suggest that, if it is to work at the level of visual metaphor—of a feminist wave bearing an exceptional woman aloft—it don’t quite work as it’s too phallic. I wonder whether Hambling, an anarchic trickster, was having a bit of a joke at feminist’s expense, when the public reaction suggested that a more respectful rendering of Wollstonecraft herself was desired. Those who funded the sculpture voted for the Hambling because the realist bronze was designed by a man: half-baked liberal fauxminism lead to confused thinking throughout the project. Michele intends to keep an open mind before going to see it at the end of lockdown 2.

  “I’ll lay a wreath on the statue, then meet my friend, the writer Alison Sell. We’ve kept each other going. She’s a fantastic novelist and poet who lives on Newington Green. She’s wonderful, underrated currently. She’s one of those feminist writers who has written a great many novels and poetry. She chooses not to play the game of publicity, which is estimable.”

  I say that word-of-mouth is where the best reading recommendations come, as book marketing—and sometimes prize-giving—can be an unreliable guide.

  “You’re heroic. I think mothers are heroic. Nobody ever gives you a medal or gold star, not that you’d want one necessarily.”

  I wish Michele good luck writing and wrestling with her rosebushes, and we peel away to continue our days, but I haven’t stopped thinking about what she said since.

  Post-script: I asked Michele a few followup questions by email. Of the J K Rowling ‘controversy’ over the summer, she wrote “I think writers should be free to write whatever they want in their fiction. When they make public statements about contentious issues they may well be disagreed with, but that is good, since we need debate and disagreements and we need to hear different points of view. But responses should be courteous and thoughtful. People need to listen to what the other person is saying rather than attack her for saying it.”

  With regard to the role of editors, she said “A good editor tries to help make the book what it wants and needs to be, and does not impose her own wishes. An editor trying to make a writer write according to the market, according to commercial fashions, is seeing books and writers merely as commodities.”

  I asked whether she felt it was a risk to publish her intimate diary. She said “I didn’t feel particularly brave in putting out such personal content. I was amazed anyone wanted to publish it, since I hadn’t written it for publication, and only thought afterwards of publishing it. I wanted to be truthful. Writing any book is an act of bravery. There can be so many inner voices whispering that we’re self-indulgent, narcissistic, arrogant. We have to be bloodyminded in order to write.”

  Finally, I asked Michele what she is working on now. She said “At the moment I am writing poetry and dreaming up my next novel.”

COLETTE

My literary mother

MICHELE ROBERTS

160pp. Oxford University Press. 18.99 [pounds sterling] (US $24.99).

In 2023 France celebrated 150 years since the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a writer who enthralled readers with frank, provocative explorations of desire, friendship and other pleasures of the flesh in genre-defying works such as La Vagabonde (1910; The Vagabond, 1912), Cheri (1920; 1951) and La Naissance du jour (1928; Break of Day, 1961). The anniversary gave rise to a constellation of books musing on her legacy, with offerings from luminaries of French literary culture such as Emmanuelle Lambert and Antoine Compagnon, and a collective anthology, Notre Colette, a portrait of the writer as read by fans including Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.

In the English-speaking world tributes have been sparser, an omission that Michele Roberts's new reflective essay, Colette: My Literary Mother, sets out to remedy. As its subtitle suggests, this unconventional book is profoundly intimate rather than clinically academic. Instead of attempting an exhaustive inventory of Colette's output as a novelist, playwright and journalist, Roberts--herself an accomplished novelist and poet--analyses four key works of personal importance: La Maison de Claudine (1922; My Mother's House, 1966), Break of Day, Cheri and La Lune de pluie (1940; The Rainy Moon, 1958). She celebrates Colette's "straightforwardly amoral celebration of sensuality, the materiality of food and plants and creatures", and her analysis takes a similarly earthy, grounded approach. This book reads like a warm, insightful conversation between two writers, with us--their audience privileged to eavesdrop. Roberts never lets her prose curdle into abstract suppositions, or laboured analysis: this engrossing book is mercifully free of the dry pronouncements of the literary seminar.

Motherhood is the organizing thread of the book's four short chapters, both Colette's relationship with her towering mother figure, known as "Sido", and Roberts's "mother-daughter dancing game of attachment and loss, of leaving and returning", experienced with her French mother, Monique. In deft psychoanalytic insights Roberts acknowledges her need as a young woman to reject or separate out from her mother's native language. We sense that rereading Colette (and providing her own, personal translations from the French) has allowed her to settle some of her maternal ambivalence. "I have moved from a childish need either to idealise [my mother] or to see her as a tyrant, to recognising the difficulties in her life," she writes.

Roberts is also an astute close reader of Colette, dissecting her "originality of invention" and formal innovations such as weaving multiple genres "fiction, autobiography, memoir, reverie, letters" into Break of Day and the precocious "space made for the female gaze" in Cheri, where Lea hungrily appraises her lover's masculine contours during an era in which women were expected to remain passive objects of desire. For Roberts such qualities elevate the author to the status of inventor of the modern novel, an accolade usually afforded to male modernist titans such as Proust or Joyce. Roberts, though, is wary of branding Colette an early exponent of contemporary autofiction, claiming that her avant-gardism "predates such terms." This flirtation with the markers of literary history can feel a shade disorienting. Yet it is close to Colette's own cat-and-mouse game with her reader, her desire to draw us in without ever allowing us to get too close. Overall, Roberts makes a convincing case for an intuitive and cumulative reading of Colette, unencumbered by the drive towards explicit "labelling". "Labelling," Roberts writes, "can fence off a work before I have tried it for myself [...] If I need to label this text of Colette's, I see her as an experimental modernist, showing us how her work is made: she comments on what she's just written, she questions the reader, she consults with Sido's ghost. She may pretend from time to time that she is artless, just idly daydreaming and free-associating, but her roman fleuve demonstrates a sophisticated handling of narrative."

In thinking about motherhood Roberts contemplates wider models of literary kinship, considering the "many gendered mothers" (in Maggie Nelson's turn of phrase), that birth a writer and their works. Colette: My literary mother, as well as acting as the generous "bridge into Colette country for readers approaching her for the first time" that Roberts hopes, is also, at many junctures, a valuable writers' manual, full of advice from both Colette ("Look long at what pleases you and longer still at what displeases you") and Roberts ("accept ambivalence, be contradictory if necessary, play tricks if you want to").

At moments, the gratitude that Michele Roberts feels towards Colette for encouraging her to "read better and write better" risks narrowing her critical distance. Yet the enchantment that this grande dame of French letters has woven over her is one that carries over into her interpretation of Colette: reading her take, this reader wanted to remain in the rich night of the book, and for day not to break the spell.

Alice Blackhurst is the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image, 2021. She is working on a book about Marguerite Duras's The Lover

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Blackhurst, Alice. "The pursuit of maman: Finding literary kinship in Colette's family ties." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6342, 18 Oct. 2024, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813497872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=05809d2c. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Roberts, Michèle COLETTE Oxford Univ. (NonFiction None) $24.99 11, 7 ISBN: 9780192858214

Rereading an illustrious writer.

As part of Oxford University Press' My Reading series, award-winning novelist, poet, memoirist, and playwright Roberts offers intimate reflections about her connection to Colette (1873-1954) by considering four texts that had particular significance for her:My Mother's House, a prismatic memoir of linked stories;Break of Day, an autobiographical novel;Chéri, Colette's famous tale of a seductive gigolo and his aging mistress; andThe Rainy Moon, a novella that Roberts first read during a particularly dark time when she was in her 30s. Raised in the "grip of Catholic morality" by a strict, undemonstrative mother, sent to a convent school that instilled a sense of "self-hatred as a woman," the young Roberts discovered in Colette "an enticing landscape distinguished by its straightforwardly amoral celebration of sensuality."My Mother's House, in which Colette's mother, Sido, "appears as a figure of powerful, overarching mythic status," helped Roberts to rethink her relationship with her own overpowering mother and to find her way back "to that unsentimental, strong, practical French woman." Colette showed her a new way to think about femininity as well, not as self-abnegation or inferiority to men, but "as a performance or a disguise or a fancy-dress costume." For Colette, Roberts asserts, writing was aggressive, in keeping with her celebration of her "robust, healthy body" and voracious appetites. Besides highlighting themes of women's independence and agency, Roberts reveals ways that Colette shaped her as a writer: teaching her, for example, that there was "a wealth of ways to use autobiographical material"; presenting prodigious examples of "supple and muscular" prose, skillfully shaped characters and dialogue, and writing replete with sensuous textures and sharply observed details.

Insightful close readings inform a fervent homage.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Roberts, Michele: COLETTE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4e48f9f6. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Michele Roberts

SILLY LADY NOVELISTS?

51pp. Rack Press. Paperback, 8 [pounds sterling].

9780993104596

In "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", an essay published anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1856, George Eliot declared that "silly" writing was reinforcing "the popular prejudice against the more solid education of women". In writing of this "mind and millinery" kind, a lovely and virtuous heroine faces some unrealistic problem and overcomes adversity to make a good match to an adorable man. The novelist Michele Roberts has now written a riposte to Eliot, re-reading her essay about novels with titles such as Laura Gay and Rank and Beauty, for an age in which silliness comes in Fifty Shades. The questions that introduce Silly Lady Novelists? only make the reader wonder if anything has changed at all: "What kind of novels should women write? Should anyone be prescribing the answer to such a question?" There is a wearying sense that such questions are designed to placate a male rather than a female audience.

The argument takes a while to get going properly. An early flippant take-down of A Room with a View ignores the fact that E. M. Forster's "silly" Miss Lavish is merely one of a cast of comic characters, no more outrageous than the bumbling vicar Mr Beebe. Indeed, the spoiled and indecisive protagonist Lucy Honeychurch is explicitly steered away from convention through Miss Lavish's hyperbolic but enabling fiction. Forster's inclusion feels shoehorned in given that he was involved in the Men's League for Women's Suffrage; was there a shortage of male authors to reference depicting unflattering portraits of female writers? Or were they all women? Well before George Eliot's original essay, Jane Austen was making fun of the fans and writers of Gothic novels, with her protagonist in Northanger Abbey so immersed in fictional fantasies that she fails to engage with her own life at all.

More illuminating is Roberts's exploration of working-class women writers, including a striking comparison of Eliot as a wealthy unmarried woman with Elizabeth Gaskell as a writing wife and mother. Literary ambitions often had to be hidden, and "the ruthlessness required for writing" concealed "behind a ruched cloak of velvety modesty". As Roberts notes, women were rewriting womanhood by working "in a man's world"; and the popularity of those "hordes of genteel lady novelists" was instrumental in making society accept that women could be literary artists.

Roberts also offers a compelling account of how the complex literary history of women writers, formerly obscured, was later recovered through the emergence of feminist presses in the 1960s and 70s. Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, for instance, was initially neglected by literary scholars because of its perceived feminine characteristics, and only later acknowledged as a masterpiece of psychological drama. Here Roberts gets into her stride, explaining how women's writing finally expanded its definitions, becoming "provocative rather than preachy, realist as well as poetic". Eliot would have approved.

The tone is, at times, a little trying--at one point, Roberts describes the varieties of feminists as coming "in different shapes, like Liquorice All Sorts"--but in general her observations about the literary landscape are engaging and convincing. As Roberts notes, some female writers continue to deny their gender, at least nominally. Publishers still produce books by the gender-neutral likes of S. J. Bolton or J. K. Rowling (who, like Eliot, has also published under a male pseudonym). It is only strange, perhaps, that Roberts avoids discussing Elena Ferrante, a writer whose pseudonym and persona even now conceal aspects of her identity without denying her femininity. Concealment is not what it once was, for the Brontes and Eliot herself.

Roberts fits a great deal into these fifty pages. Yet there remains an impression of disjointedness--of interesting insights and provocative, personal readings, that do not amount to a coherent polemic. There is a missed opportunity here, for instance, to discuss drastically changed social circumstances. Nineteenth-century women adopted male pseudonyms out of necessity as much as personal preference; in many ways, women were second-class citizens, denied the vote in British general elections until 1918. It is little wonder that women's writing was found to be "silly" at a time where women's lives were still largely controlled by men. For writers today, the playing field should, in theory, be even, and the decision to engage with or refute the rhetoric of silliness a free one; yet the decision to write as a woman remains loaded. Women may have political and financial freedoms that they did not have when Eliot wrote, but the expectations of the past retain considerable force. "Silly lady novelists"? Michele Roberts's title poses a question that has yet to be answered.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hawlin, Thea. "Mind and millinery: A response to George Eliot's essay on 'silly' female writers." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5959, 16 June 2017, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634850928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b772c001. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Michele Roberts

THE WALWORTH BEAUTY

400pp. Bloomsbury. 16.99 [pounds sterling].

978 1 4088 8339 6

In Michele Roberts's The Walworth Beauty, Walworth is not just a district in London's bustling Borough of Southwark. It is also a historical palimpsest, a place where London's past and present overlap--where it seems plausible that people from different eras might somehow cross paths.

The novel focuses on two lives that, intersecting across time, converge on one resonant location: a terraced cul-de-sac called Apricot Place. Here, in the mid nineteenth century, Joseph Benson, a researcher for Henry Mayhew's landmark series London Labour and the London Poor, meets the mysterious landlady Mrs. Dulcimer. Joseph's task is to interview prostitutes, classified by Mayhew as members of the criminal, rather than respectable, poor. His instructions are to maintain strict scientific detachment, but he is inexplicably drawn to Mrs Dulcimer, whose household turns out not to be quite the kind he expected. He is also unbalanced by the tangle of guilt, desire and pleasure in his own furtive encounters with prostitutes. Joseph becomes increasingly frustrated with Mayhew's reductive categories: "I no longer consider", he tells his employer, "that they should be classified as criminals at all."

In the twenty-first century, Apricot Place becomes the home of Madeleine, a literature teacher who gives up her expensive flat in the City after a utilitarian panic at her college means she loses her job ("the humanities did not deliver adequate economic value"). In her new flat, Madeleine "stands in the middle of an empty space which yet feels full, currents of pulsing, unseen life, echoes of phrases she can't catch tickling her ears, pushing her back". She wonders what life was like for those whose space she now inhabits. "I've no idea", she tells a friend, "how it felt to be a London woman in those days, walking alone along a street like this one. I read Mayhew, but it's his researcher giving his version of what women say."

Joseph's and Madeleine's lives are both transformed in unexpected ways by Apricot Place, and Roberts tells their stories in elegant prose rich with vivid images conveying, as Madeleine puts it, "the present and the past both at the same time, one delicately folded around the other". Through both its form and its characters, The Walworth Beauty explores the possibility of understanding across time. How, especially, can we know the dead? The novel's own spectral encounters, though dramatically effective, are a less convincing answer than that of Madeleine, who looks to the writers: "their fought-for language brings dead authors shiningly alive. Readers make that happen, not God"--and not ghosts, either.

Caption: Leutnant der Reserve Kampf of 4 Battery, Reserve Field Artillery Regiment 23 and an Unteroffizier telephonist in an observation post on the Champagne front; from The Vest Pocket Kodak & The First World War by Jon Cooksey (96pp. Ammonite. 7.99 [pounds sterling]. 978 1 78145 279 0)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Maitzen, Rohan. "Michele Roberts: THE WALWORTH BEAUTY." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5970, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634745955/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b7cc891. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Michele Roberts

IGNORANCE

233pp. Bloomsbury. 14.99 [pounds sterling].

978 1 4088 1600 4

Michele Roberts's thirteenth novel is set around the Second World War in her familiar territory of small-town, conservative, Catholic France. Her four narrators are petit-bourgeois or impoverished women, formed and trapped by the limits of social possibility, the prejudices of their neighbours, and the internal inhibitions of their convent educations. Ignorance reaches back into France's hard pre-war poverty and prejudice, and follows the two main characters into and out of the war. Sexual expression and transgression form, as ever, one of the key themes, and here, as elsewhere in Roberts's work, there is a parallel to the Jesuit dictum: if the nuns have a girl before she is seven, she is theirs forever.

Most of the book concerns two girls thrown together by cold charity: Jeanne might have been an artist, Marie-Angele was always destined for marriage. What interrupted their trajectories was a man successful both as seducer and in business. The convent is used for the disposal of illegitimate or otherwise unwanted daughters, servants and orphans. Inside the convent, the nuns offer witness to the limits of women's possibilities, especially when deference and hierarchy shackle the poor.

The title points not only to the inhibition that is encouraged in the convent, but also to the blind-eyed incuriosity outside the convent's walls, which refuses to understand what is happening around it--such as the profiteering in Occupied France, either by semi-legal dealings with the Nazis or pure black market smuggling. The novel includes moments of revenge, both in its pure form and as disguised by apparent charity. And there are, inevitably, the family secrets, kept tightly as protection against outsiders.

Roberts's prose is elegant, and redeems the melodrama of her plots. There is, perhaps, a certain weariness here--unless it is a wink to the knowing reader--as she recycles an anti-occupier anecdote from her first novel, and suspends her central character's exile with a moment's hope in the kindness of strangers.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Morse, Ruth. "Michele Roberts: IGNORANCE." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5703, 20 July 2012, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A667234182/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3621dcbc. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Ignorance

Michele Roberts. Bloomsbury, $25 (240p)

ISBN 978-1-60819-771-2

The parochial prejudices of two provincial towns, Ste.-Marie and Ste.-Madeleine, and by extension France itself, are brilliantly revealed in this uncompromising novel of WWII ignominy and grief from Roberts, whose novel, Daughters of the House, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Marie-Angele Blanchard and Jeanne Nerin both attend the school run by the local rectory, but the similarities end there. Marie-Angele, a callous, reflexive Catholic with the proper petit-bourgeois background, weds a corrupt notable and black marketeer who extorts Jews during the war, and she eventually achieves wealth and status and gives birth to seven children. Jeanne, a penniless Jew who works as a maid in a bordello frequented by German soldiers, is ostracized and publicly humiliated, as a "disgrace to womanhood," after the war despite her Resistance activities, and forced to abandon her child. Lavish descriptions are the author's trademark. A mere couch will never surface in Roberts's world: "the pink brocade sofas were fat and plush. Cosy armfuls you'd call them if they were girls. They lolled about the room sleepily, brazen and half-bare, their covering tasseled shawls, gypsy bright, slipped to the floor." Mostly, Roberts's polished, ornately wrought prose adds depth and a sense of acute realism to her captivating story-which flows seamlessly between the protagonists as they take turns narrating this accomplished and inspired novel of wartime France. Agent: Ayesha Karim, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Jan.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Ignorance." Publishers Weekly, vol. 259, no. 43, 22 Oct. 2012, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A307787774/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03015b20. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Roberts, Michèle IGNORANCE Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $25.00 1, 22 ISBN: 978-1-60819-771-2

This is a taut, unsentimental story of poverty and prejudice: two girls, one Catholic and the other a convert, grow up in a small town in Catholic France in the period before World War II. The war divides them from each other and their values. Roberts (The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 2007, etc.), Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. She has written works in multiple genres. In her latest novel, Jeanne and Marie-Ang�le attend the convent school in Ste. Madeleine. Marie-Ang�le is Catholic and daughter of a local shopkeeper. Jeanne is Jewish and poor. Her mother is a laundress. Though her mother converted, the change made no difference in their circumstances. The style is terse, clipped and idiosyncratic. The mind has almost no place in these characters' hard lives, except in the rudimentary plans for survival, and even these plans are directed towards body modification: The Jews dye their hair blond before preparing to flee. Surreal moments of great power arise from the crushing force the world exerts on characters unprepared, because it is impossible to be completely prepared. The forces of history are relentless, the conditions of poverty grinding. A worthy novel unusual for its tough-minded, unsparing story and the restrained method of its telling.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Roberts, Michele: IGNORANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2012. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A305184914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5e25e30e. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Michele Roberts is a contemporary feminist writer born in England in 1949. Brought up with two languages and cultures, she was educated at a religious school and she later lived in a convent for a long time. The conversation presented below took place in London in August 2010. The purpose of this interview was to talk with Michele Roberts about her writing and the link between her novels and her memoir. The contemporary and feminist writer talked about Virginia Woolf, Marion Milner, about personal and public spheres, about exploring when writing and about being an artist, among other topics. The conversation is thus presented in full as it happened.

Keywords: memoir, Michele Roberts, novels, women's writing

**********

Michele Roberts is a contemporary feminist writer born in Hertfordshire, England in 1949. She was brought up with two languages and cultures and she was educated at a religious school. Half-English and half-French, Roberts also lived in a convent for a long time, and these facts have influenced her works. Daughter of an English Protestant father and a French Catholic mother, Roberts has always combined her personal inner feelings with the political outer thoughts in her narration. Not only were her parents relevant in her upbringing but also her grandmother. As the novelist has commented on various occasions, the figure of her grandmother gave her freedom and inspiration at the time of writing. Her grandmother introduced Roberts in the art of storytelling and thus in the process of imagining, dreaming and inventing (The Book of Mrs Noah). In relation to her family, Roberts has also revealed how her battle with her mother--that body of authority who wants to have power over her daughter and makes her behave according to the morality required by society--has been depicted in her works of fiction (A Piece of the Night). On the other hand, not only the relationship between mother and daughter, but also the union between father and daughter, and her wish to be accepted by the male body, are reflected in novels like Impossible Saints.

Roberts attended Oxford University where she read a Bachelor of Arts in English. It was during these years at university that Michele Roberts became a member of the "Women's Liberation Movement," which she has always supported by writing articles in magazines like Spare Rib and City Limits. Michele Roberts has not only been a feminist activist, but she has also performed other professions such as a librarian in Bangkok, a cook, and a creative writing professor at the University of Norwich. Although she lives between France and England, Roberts has also resided in Thailand, Italia, and USA.

Through exploring, reading and writing, and through the revision of stories Michele Roberts has fought against the stereotypes marked by society, and against the doctrines defended by the Catholic Church, although she recognises that this religious culture has given her both stories and a productive language. Roberts has always fought back against authoritarianism, against Catholicism, and it is by means of her novels how the feminist writer creates new women who are liberated from religious, social and political margins. In this line, there are many depictions of the body and sex in Roberts's heroines. For Roberts, the female protagonist is rescued in order that she can verbally and sexually express herself being triumphant before the Fathers of the Church. For that reason, Roberts subversively finishes with the binaries between good and bad women in novels such as The Wild Girl, for instance, in which not only being a woman is fully depicted and celebrated but also, the sexual union with the man.

Michele Roberts's production is quite varied. The contemporary author has written novels, short stories, poetry, articles and essays. This conversation, however, did especially focus on her works of fiction. Her first novel was written when the author was 29 years old, A Piece of the Night (1978), and it shows biographical data about the search of her persona and her sexuality. The Visitation (1983), The Wild Girl (1984) and The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) are three novels that deal with biblical women. Roberts has been inspired by women's position in the Church and she provides other ways of being for them: Eve, Mary Magdalene and Mrs Noah. Roberts is more experimental in her writing with In the Red Kitchen (1990), a narration that combines different voices and historical periods with the three main protagonists: Flora, Hattie and the Pharaoh's daughter. Daughters of the House (1992) won the W. S. Smith Literary Award. Impossible Saints (1997) and Fair Exchange (1999) are two novels inspired by historical women, being Saint Theresa of Avila in the first narration and Mary Wollstonecraft in the latter. The Looking Glass (2000) is the novel set in Normandy just before First World War, in which Genevieve is alone in search of a home and of love, that of the poet Gerard. Charlotte Bronte's individuality and myth is revisited and rewritten in The Mistressclass (2003), a novel that combines the Bronte sisters' accounts with those of two writers and sisters living in contemporary London. The two narrations intertwine to connect past and present. Reader, I Married Him (2005) is about Aurora, the woman who transforms her persona every time she gets married.

In the conversation presented below, Michele Roberts talked about her novels and also about her memoir. She described how her autobiographical account, Paper Houses." A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond (2007) took place mainly in the city of London during revolutionary years for young women who wanted to be heard and who wanted to enter into the public domain. Michele Roberts also talked about her beginnings as a writer during the 70s in such a urban space. The figure of the female flaneur who strolls around London to explore and to observe instead of being observed, was also discussed in this conversation.

This interview took place in a cafe during my research stay at the Institute of English Studies (IES), School of Advanced Studies at the University of London on August 13th, 2010. I would like to thank both the IES at the University of London for their hospitality and support while I visited them, and the Agencia Canaria the Investigacion, Innovacion y Sociedad de la Informacion (ACIISI), for funding this research work. Without the support of both institutions this conversation may have not taken place. My special thanks to Michele Roberts for her kindness and for sharing some of her time to discuss about her work.

Hi Michele, thank you very much for your time here today. Hi. The
first question I would like to ask you is, obviously, I have
enjoyed thoroughly the reading and analysis of Paper Houses: A
Memoir of the '70s and Beyond. And I cannot stop connecting your
memoir with those autobiographical writings by Virginia Woolf. Why
have you chosen the form of the memoir to write one of your most
recent literary works? Have you preserved that polarity between
fiction and fact or between the narrator and the narratee?
I have to tell you something quite banal which is that my dear publisher suggested that I write a memoir. It was her idea. I then thought what I should write about. And I thought. I'd like to write about the seventies because I think they've become very misrepresented in modem culture at the time of cultural self indulgent, nonsense, on the one hand, and the glamour of Baroque, but also, on the other hand, puritanical feminisms. And of course, feminism wasn't puritanical. So I thought I can set the record straight. And I also realised in the seventies when I did get going as a writer, so it was about my beginnings. And because I am a kind of Marxist too I've believed in history and that memory involves history in complicated ways. I was going to write about my self starting as a writer and about the seventies and I had to write about the politics of the time which I was very involved in as a woman and as a writer.

So, for the second part of your question, I quickly realised that to write a memoir, you have to give it a form, a shape. And that's where you draw upon your fictional knowledge of the form. Because similar chronology isn't enough, I think. Well to get it published these days, there has to be a story. So, I came up with this idea of a story about my move from house to house to house to house. And it would be a story not only about what happens in the house but between the haunting, on the street, because that is where politics will happen, on the street. So for women just as much as for men because the whole thing about the women movement was about as women we could leave their house and could live beyond the street and demonstrate, to make theatre, to enjoy yourself, to go for walks, to meet each other. So that is how the form of the memoir slowly arrived.

In relation to Virginia Woolf would you say that she was a kind of
literary mother in your writing?
Well, she is and she isn't and that is perhaps what you'd say about all mothers, that you are ambivalent about them. You love them and hate them. They give you life but also they smack you in the face. So, of course she was a major influence on me as a young woman reader. And I think I admire the way in which every sentence is so downfall, created. She is never banal. But on the other hand, I thought because I her novels had really very little about the body in them, not really a visible, sweaty, bloody, shitting body. But I did find it very interesting. In her diaries there is much more body. And in her letters. So when she is at The Lighthouse (1927), for example, the body is there. And then one of her memoirs, which is really beautiful, Moments of Being (1976), that I think I read several times. And she starts really with a bodily life of the child that she was. And I think somehow she is connecting that to the desire to write. She does it much more open. This is at the end of her life. So the child and young woman bodily life are connected to writing, whereas in her novels, that connection is very implicit.

Also, Michele you don't mind that I use your first name, of course
... You have become a prolific writer dedicated to different
writing forms but you have mostly written novels. What
correspondence do you see between the woman's novel and the woman's
memoir?
First of all, I would just need to say that although my publishers were thought postmodern they are very close to modem poetry. And they have quite other connections with other forms like theatre or plays. I think I became interested in fictional forms which involved looking at the inner life of the person. I am really, really interested in the secret unconscious mind and the paranoia. It may be speaking under the first person or it may be speaking over the shoulder. That does connect the memoir, I think, because in a memoir there is a certain speaker who currently, just currently is trying to tell the truth. And what interests me is that in a memoir apparently you can tell the truth but you can lie as much as you like, you can leave out parts as much as you like, which is really a fictional way of writing. And in a novel you are very deliberately playing that notion of telling the truth. So, for me, yes, there are bridges. And I think my work, my novels often look at the memoir. For example, The Looking Glass is a novel absolutely compared to the memoir in the first person. And I think, Impossible Saints, although it was written in the third person, it's absolutely concerned with a non-fictional form. So, for me, they interconnect but I couldn't tell you so in an abstract, theoretical way. All I can tell you is in this particular book I was exploring and the interconnection overlapped. So they do interconnect. And maybe one of connections is that women are traditionally told to lie, and that's quite interesting. What do you lie about? Do we lie? Shall we tell the truth? It's this Freudian thought ...

Yes, another question related to your memoir is London. London has
been the location chosen to write this personal account of your
life in the controversial 70s and 80s. Did you want to connect your
own persona's progress and your identity with the urban city of
London?
Yes, I did very much. That was just side of me though because I am half-French and half-English, although I grew up in a suburb, which is half way between the country and the city, I tend to line up my father and my English life and the city. My mother was from the French countryside. And I am currently living in both French countryside and the city of London. So, that memoir ... So, I think my formation as a young woman is really, really about the city. It's all very important to say the city is the place where I became politicised and became a feminist.

Oh God, it's huge topic, isn't it? Since modernism, I think, lot of radical artists were marching away from the countryside in their visions, from a world of agriculture and the reaction of all types of notions ... And I think the idea of "You cannot make art about the countryside, it has to be urban". Well, I'm not actually sure about that because

I've written a novel set in the French countryside (Daughters of the House, for instance), which are about politics, and not about the city. When I came to write about my formation, it was about the city. Yes. That was something to do with walking the streets and meeting people. Because in the countryside you've got to walk and you don't know who you will find in your walk.

Yes, I think I do remember one example in your memoir in which you
compare the city of Oxford as a kind of countryside and the city of
London. And also in that comparison I remember that you criticised
the male society watching you, the woman. How scared you could feel
in the countryside of Oxford and how more secured you could feel in
the city of London.
True, although in the city you got harassed by men all the time, you could run away quickly round the corner, or into a shop or into a pub whereas in the countryside if you are in a field and there is a man is harassing you it's hard to get away. I mean I was harassed all the time, which is what happens to young women all the time in those days. I think women still get harassed a huge amount. Because I am older I don't feel it in the same way. The city in that sense is a lot of safer. And the city traditionally tells us as women not to stay safe, to feel always scared.

And I wonder now, talking about cities, how much of truth was there
in the story of Bangkok. Did it really happen to you?
Oh yes. It was very scary. Thanks God that you are here. Although this young man, I think he was also so frightened about what he had done. I mean I did know that he wasn't going to rape me but still it was all very, very frightening.

The next question is about the female flaneur, would you say that
you have combined both modern and postmodern techniques in the
writing of your personal account?
Oh God, that's a difficult question. Both laughing. Well I suppose, I became aware that at the moment a lot of men are writing about walking in the city: Ian Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd. Some write about psychogeography, and sometimes of course about being a flaneur ... And I got terribly irritated because they never refer to women, as beings that can walk around. The women are completely absent in this account. And I know from my reading that modernist women writers loved walking the city. They were doing it. Virginia Woolf, you know, and her diaries are full of her walking. Dorothy L. Sayers, Katherine Mansfield ... I mean all these modernist women who were living and writing in London walked around the city at a time of great recording and brilliant example. And my taste of this, as a postmodernist perhaps is to make judge. And I just noticed the word, the man is a flaneur and a woman who would walk the streets, a streetwalker, will be a prostitute. And I think that tradition is there. There is something deeply difficult and problematic for the woman who likes roaming the streets by herself, she is still seen as a problem. And I wish she, ... all these dangerous things didn't do that, all she's is just harassed and aggressed. But for men is just different. It goes back to Baudelaire, the flaneur, doesn't it? I mean, I don't think he would walk the streets with a female companion. He was looking at women. But perhaps there is a switch for woman to be an object and becoming a subject, I don't know if that is modernist or a postmodernist, but it makes sense. You're perceived to be the object instead of the public subject. But of course to do that you have to defy yourself a bit and short respond it. And I put the picture in here (Paper Houses: A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond). That is a picture of me in my outfit walking in the street. It's a self portrait. Oh, yes, how beautiful. I didn't know that. Yes, ya. Both laughing.

Let's keep talking about women's writing. In Paper Houses, as in
most of your works of fiction, you have used the first person
narration to tell the personal story, which, at the same time, is
connected to the public history. Could you talk a little bit about
that connection between the inner and the outer worlds in Paper
Houses as part of your developing identity, or as part of a
rebirth?
Gosh. It was a kind of project to trying and map the inner life to the outer life and remap that outer life back to the inner life. And I think I was doing that while I was reading about a wonderful psychoanalyst and writer called Marion Milner. She was not other thing but an analyst. She wrote On not Being Able to Paint (1950), Eternity's Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary (2010) and A Life of One's Own (1934). And she talked about creativity a great deal. And she was the first person I was reading in my late twenties who was suggesting that your inner world connected intimately to the outer world via emotions, for example, desire or fear. And I got on reading a whole project of writers. Julia Kristeva became very important. She talks about, this is complicated... She talks about the way you abstract words to make our emotions, that you might say I felt angry or I felt great. She had this wonderful life as part of this currently bodily feeling, which we call emotions. And I connected that to the metaphor and how we make metaphor out of this currently bodily feeling. And we made the metaphor by subjecting it onto an image in the outside world which connects everything to Marion Milner's idea. And I began to see that metaphor remains profoundly important to me because it connects us to the world. It's always taking our inner life and saying: it's part of the universe, it's part of the world. Because I might say I'm feeling as cold as that and then I am immediately hot. And it matters to me more and more because in the modern world metaphor is not fashionable and people are supposed to be like little atoms although we are all sort of connected by machine, mobile phone or email. With this connection I am part of universe which is expressed by metaphor. I'm very fond of it. I think it's incredibly important. It is a kind of religion. That is a very long way to answer it.

Yes, thank you.

Sorry, can I say something about ... Not all my novels are written in the first person. Quite a few are in the third person. Yes, you said that Impossible Saints is one of them. And it is an experiment. I come back to the first person because I feel it's always not me that in the first person. It's a paradox. While in the third person I can be in there much.

Would you confirm that you have been concerned with the dearth of
women in the critical canon of great writers by remembering and
rescuing women and giving them a voice in your novels?
Yes. It's not even just in the canon of literature. It's a kind of women giving to the world. It's not recognised. It's not valued. The women are valued as mothers. They are also sentimentalised and Christianised. They may be valued as writers or scientists. But then their body would be taken away. I think culturally women are devalued of when women are in the world not on the world. Because my place is writing, I look at women writers. So, yes, I would confirm it. Yes.

Just another question in relation to Paper Houses again. You have
dealt with different topics such as language, freedom, writing,
sex, love, friendship, family, exploring, and marriage, among
others. Marriage has always been a recurrent topic in women's
narrative and in Paper Houses you describe two different marriages
in your life, being the one with Jim the most celebrated experience
in which you felt not only a woman but also an artist. Could you
talk about that link between domestic life and professional
writing?
Well, I have to be very personal. That's fine. The lovely thing about Jim was he immediately recognised me as a fellow artist. It was normal. That was wonderful. He was the first man in my life who ever thought that it was completely normal that I become an artist. And of course, he understood feminism. He had many artist friends, many women. He liked women very much. And then he immediately offered me a home because I was homeless. And because he worked at home, we were both living in an artist studio, really. So, he didn't break the artist practice with being a father who was there at home looking after his sons. And that was really inspiring because I had quite a lot of space in the house, a space to start with my writing and together, I think, we tried to find a way where we integrated domestic life and art. And of course it was a time in which many writers were looking at those connections anyway. I mean postfeminists and postdomestic I think it's called, it became a subject. You know, you had Mary Kelly showing dirty nappies in the art gallery. You had women artists actually talking about housework. It was a good time. So, all I can say is integration in somehow was something that it was dead but it was possible to kind of revalue domestic as a space in which things happen. Of course as a woman I knew domestic violence happened in a domestic space, child abuse has already happened in a domestic place, rage happened in a domestic space. We tried to be living in a domestic space and also in an artistic studio. It was all very inspiring.

I don't really have a last question but I was now wondering about
that domestic place, that place of your own to be writing. And I
wonder if you wouldn't mind describing how it is like. How is that
place of your own like
when writing? Well, do you mean, in abstract or in reality? I mean
in abstract, as a writer.
Yes, because of the idea of Paper Houses, it could be anywhere. That is about my life. I've lived in many places. I've moved a great deal. So, it's something temporary. It needs have a lot of capacity for solely view and privacy. But then it needs to be a magic place that can attract all the selves, somewhere where at 6.00 o'clock people come in, and we cook, and eat, and dance, make love, eat, get bored and drink. That's what I've conveyed in the sacred convent in Impossible Saints because in the way we have to live in a guttural culture with small houses. You've seen it in Twickenham: streets and streets and streets of tiny houses. And they all have a sitting room, a kitchen, a dinning room, two bedrooms for the children, one bedroom for their parents. Who gets any privacy? How can you be artist in that surrounding? In England men go to their shed. To the garden shed is where the man go and the woman has no where to go. So, I talk about this all the time with my partner as half of the time we live together, and half of the time I say no, it's impossible. I wouldn't have much space because he is a psychiatrist and works at home. So, this ideal place really has a table, a chair, and I'll have a laptop, and I think it'll have a window. Ideally, it has a little garden. So, it is a paper house folded up. It's a book. It really is. And then, yes, I am very materialistic. You know in my fantasies. I'd love to live in a very beautiful house, very luxurious, a French manner house, bla bla bla. I don't have the money for that. I've always lived in small places but I'm very happy. So, really my house, my writing house really is my imagination. It really, really is. This time and space here is also a paper house. As soon as I have a view... I could sit here with my diary, my notebook and this is a house because at the time we are talking we have made a house. I really believe it's true.

OK, thank you very much for your time here today, Michele. That was
very interesting.
Well, thank you!

Both Laughing

Bibliography

Milner, Marion. A Life of One's Own. London: Routledge, 2010.

Milner, Marion. Eternity's Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary. London: Routledge, 2010.

Milner, Marion. On not Being Able to Paint. London: Routledge, 2010.

Roberts, Michele. A Piece of the Night. London: The Women's Press, 1978.

Roberts, Michele. The Visitation. London: The Women's Press, 1983.

Roberts, Michele. The Wild Girl. London: Minerva, 1984.

Roberts, Michele. The Book of Mrs Noah. London: Vintage, 1987.

Roberts, Michele. In the Red Kitchen. London: Vintage, 1990.

Roberts, Michele. Daughters of the House. London: Virago Press, 1992.

Roberts, Michele. Flesh and Blood. London: Virago Press, 1994.

Roberts, Michele. Impossible Saints. London: Virago Press, 1997.

Roberts, Miche1e. Food, Sex & God: On Inspiration and Writing. London: Virago Press, 1998.

Roberts, Miche1e. Fair Exchange. London: Little Brown, 1999.

Roberts, Miche1e. The Looking Glass. London: Little Brown, 2000.

Roberts, Miche1e. The Mistressclass. London: Little Brown, 2003.

Roberts, Michele. Paper Houses." A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond. London: Virago Press, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Boston: Mariner Books, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985.

By Roni Berger (1)

(1) The author is a lecturer at the Faculty of English Studies at the Universidad of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain where she has taught language, culture and literature courses both online and on a face-to-face basis. Her research areas are focused on women's writing, literature, culture and language in contemporary contexts. Email: msgarcia@dfm.ulpgc.es

Garcia-Sanchez, M. Soraya

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Bridgewater State College
http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Garcia-Sanchez, M. Soraya. "A conversation with Michele Roberts, about novels, history and autobiography." Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2011, pp. 183+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A261869846/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14e0dd99. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Half-French, half-English, poet, novelist, Orange Prize judge, feminist, "unaligned" socialist, Michele Roberts' prose luxuriates in language and politics "with a small p".

Her new collection of short stories, Mud (Virago, June) is her first since Playing Sardines in 2001, and her first publication since autobiography Paper Houses in 2007. It has taken her about four years to write. "I've always loved short stories," she says. "The process is probably less anxious than writing a novel. There's something about the intensity of a short story that I love ... You can reinvent them all the time [whereas] with the novel there's a huge weight of tradition. There's something about modern life that suits the short story. It's a bit snipped up and jagged and raw and I think stories are like that."

Connecting to childhood

Like much of her other fiction Mud returns to the themes of love, sex, femininity, food and sensuality. "I have a belief that to create well, to be an artist, you have to have a strong connecting cord to your childhood. To the very wild person you were. Hating, anger, desire, the hurly burly of emotion. My inspiration is that whirlpool of passionate feeling ... You have to let it go on forming you." Roberts' excoriation of Catholicism is another theme she returns to time and again: "I'm a very sensual person--it's a rebellion against being Catholic. The idea that women are terrible, the body is terrible ... The body and spirit should be one, [I want to write about] mud, or sweat, or someone's instep."

Roberts' protagonists are intensely corporeal: they bleed, cry, sweat, have sex, vomit, walk barefoot. "I think what the characters represent are moods in myself. It could be despair or disgust or desire or shame, and it's quite malleable, it's like a wet bit of earth or mud or ... pastry!"

Untold stories

Mud also reimagines otherwise familiar stories: the sensual country childhood of French author Colette, the observations of the young maid of novelist George Sand, the bitter reminiscences of the nursemaid of Adele Rochester, the hero's daughter in Jane Eyre.

"I'm always interested in the stories of servants, partly because my English grandmother was a servant. It's a very particular point of view that didn't used to get represented in memoirs or novels ... She's on the periphery, but she can see an awful amount--she washes the sheets and the knickers ...

"When you're on the margins, you see an awful lot. When I was a young writer I felt on the margins, because I grew up a long time ago and men were so dominant in the literary world. Women writers weren't talked about, weren't thought about, weren't mentioned, weren't discussed. That whole generation of Martin Amis and co. So you learn to be pushed aside ... but it's a brilliant vantage point to look at a whole culture."

Passionate and lively, she has nearly finished a novel set in the aftermath of the Second World War in France, when the spectre of collaboration still hung over the population. "My grandparents lived in occupied France; it's about what you do to survive. And how you represent your past."

Roberts, now in her early 60s, admits that publishing has changed "hugely" in her time, with the end of the NBA meaning "books are not judged on aesthetic merit, but on whether they are viable in marketing terms". She offers an enthusastic defence of short fiction: "There is a perception that short stories don't sell. But they love them in the US and Canada, and it's changing with the web and webzines. Young people love them. It's time we got rid of that cliche."

CV

Born 1949, Hertfordshire

Read for a BA English Language and Literature at Somerville, Oxford

1973-4 Librarian for the British Council in Bangkok 1974

Poetry editor for Spare Rib and City Limits magazine (1981-83).

Currently Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UEA

Selected titles:

1978 A Piece of the Night (The Women's Press)

1987 The Book of Mrs Noah (Methuen)

1992 Daughters of the House (Virago)

1997 Impossible Saints (Little, Brown)

1999 Fair Exchange (Little, Brown)

2001 Playing Sardines (Virago)

2005 Reader, I Married Him (Little, Brown)

2007 Paper Houses (Virago)

2010 Mud (Virago)

Editor: Lennie Goodings, Virago

Agent: Ayesha Karim, Aitken Alexander

Allen, Katie

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 The Stage Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Allen, Katie. "Raw stories: Michele Roberts' latest collection of short stories deals with the themes of sex and love. She talks to Katie Allen." The Bookseller, no. 5422, 5 Mar. 2010, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A222590566/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a934a889. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Blackhurst, Alice. "The pursuit of maman: Finding literary kinship in Colette's family ties." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6342, 18 Oct. 2024, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813497872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=05809d2c. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. "Roberts, Michele: COLETTE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4e48f9f6. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. Hawlin, Thea. "Mind and millinery: A response to George Eliot's essay on 'silly' female writers." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5959, 16 June 2017, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634850928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b772c001. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. Maitzen, Rohan. "Michele Roberts: THE WALWORTH BEAUTY." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5970, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634745955/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b7cc891. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. Morse, Ruth. "Michele Roberts: IGNORANCE." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5703, 20 July 2012, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A667234182/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3621dcbc. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. "Ignorance." Publishers Weekly, vol. 259, no. 43, 22 Oct. 2012, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A307787774/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03015b20. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. "Roberts, Michele: IGNORANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2012. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A305184914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5e25e30e. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. Garcia-Sanchez, M. Soraya. "A conversation with Michele Roberts, about novels, history and autobiography." Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2011, pp. 183+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A261869846/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14e0dd99. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025. Allen, Katie. "Raw stories: Michele Roberts' latest collection of short stories deals with the themes of sex and love. She talks to Katie Allen." The Bookseller, no. 5422, 5 Mar. 2010, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A222590566/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a934a889. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.

Word Count