Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
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...
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
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, 2007.
70
“Inventory. Acc. 12394. Alison Fell”. National Library of Scotland.
She...
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...
A commentator on the this prize described JS
's work as postfeminist, which...
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...
The volume features 101 different women writers, each publication emblematic of the year for which its author is featured. Its contents range from the title-inspiring Miles Franklin
's My Brilliant Career (1901) through Edith Wharton
Textual Features
Susan Hill
This is a remarkably informal quarterly: the sketch on its cover shows a bouncing mad-hatter figure with a bunch of flowers in his hand and a pile of books on his head. While endearingly open...
Textual Production
Alison Fell
AF
was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group
. She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...
Timeline
June 1972: Spare Rib, a feminist periodical issued monthly...
Women writers item
June 1972
Spare Rib, a feminist periodical issued monthly by Spare Ribs
from 27 Clerkenwell Close, London, was launched to put women's liberation on the news stands.