Michèle Roberts

Standard Name: Roberts, Michèle
Birth Name: Michèle Brigitte Roberts
Married Name: Michèle Brigitte Binns
Married Name: Michèle Brigitte Latter
Used Form: Michele Roberts
MR began to write during the later twentieth century: diaries, journalism, and collaborative scenarios and improvisations, for street theatre in connection with the burgeoning women's movement of the 1970s. She has had a few plays performed since, but has published poetry, twelve novels, short stories, reviews, and a memoir. Her fiction often includes fantastic elements, and hauntings presented as fact, in its characteristically fractured narratives with perceptible sources in her own life experience. Recently responses to her work have tended to polarise: avowed feminists love her; others loathe her.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Alison Fell
The volume (Sheba's fourth ever) was decorated with exuberant drawings by Fell, Pixner , and Roberts .
Literary responses Judith Kazantzis
Michèle Roberts praised the handling of language here as totally satisfying.
Judith Kazantzis. http://www.judithkazantzis.com/.
Literary responses Pat Barker
This series of three working-class novels left PB highly respected, but critically pigeon-holed or typecast. Feminist critic Michèle Roberts notes that writing about women's domestic lives is popularly supposed to denote lack of imagination. Pat...
Literary responses Pat Barker
Another World was praised by several of PB 's fellow-novelists. Ruth Rendell thought it the most moving thing Barker had ever done; P. D. James called it subtle and beautifully written; Michele Roberts found...
Literary responses Jo Shapcott
JS was only the second woman to win the Forward Prize (following Carol Ann Duffy and preceding Kathleen Jamie in 1994).
Crown, Sarah. “Forward Prize goes to Kathleen Jamie”. Guardian Unlimited.
A commentator on the this prize described JS 's work as postfeminist, which...
Literary responses Selima Hill
This book was another Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Hill, Selima. My Sister’s Horse. Smith/Doorstop Books.
2
On its cover Michèle Roberts is quoted writing in Time Out that SH evokes the inner childhood world we're supposed to give up as we become...
Friends, Associates Zoë Fairbairns
ZF formed a feminist collective with fellow writers and socialists Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts , and Michelene Wandor .
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman.
1-3
Friends, Associates Alison Fell
As well as Sue Todd and Buzz Goodbody , her friends at this stage (who were also her political associates) included Michèle Roberts and Marsha Rowe , with whom her friendships became lifelong.
Roberts, Michèle. Paper Houses. Virago.
70
“Inventory. Acc. 12394. Alison Fell”. National Library of Scotland.
She...
Fictionalization Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf celebrated Wollstonecraft's immortality in 1929; Marjorie Bowen wrote of her critically in 1937 yet entitled her work This Shining Woman. The future anthropologist Ruth Benedict , with her own career yet to...
Family and Intimate relationships Frances Horovitz
After her death Michèle Roberts reported that the irrepressible Michael Horovitz , while devoted to her memory, was still giving less space to female than to male poets in anthologies or at his Poetry Olympics...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Roberts, Michèle. The Book of Mrs Noah. Methuen, 1987.
Roberts, Michèle. The Looking Glass. Little, Brown, 2000.
Roberts, Michèle. The Mirror of the Mother. Methuen, 1986.
Roberts, Michèle. The Mistressclass. Little, Brown, 2003.
Roberts, Michèle. The Visitation. Women’s Press, 1983.
Roberts, Michèle. The Walworth Beauty. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Roberts, Michèle. The Wild Girl. Methuen, 1984.
Kazantzis, Judith et al. Touch Papers. Allison and Busby, 1982.
Roberts, Michèle. “Women Behaving Badly”. Mslexia, No. 68, pp. 12-13.