Michèle 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.

Milestones

20 May 1949

MR was born at Bushey in Hertfordshire, one of girl twins in the middle of her family.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
162
Roberts, Michèle. Paper Houses. Virago.
3
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231

October 1984

MR 's third novel, The Wild Girl, concerns the biblical Mary Magdalene or Magdalen , whose portrayal as religious and sexually active and unmarried
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
154
was of course controversial.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)

17 September 1992

MR published Daughters of the House, her most-recognised novel to date, since it won the W. H. Smith Library Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.

Biography

Birth and Family

20 May 1949

MR was born at Bushey in Hertfordshire, one of girl twins in the middle of her family.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
162
Roberts, Michèle. Paper Houses. Virago.
3
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231