My books

Paper Houses
A fledgling writer taking a leap into radical politics, Michèle Roberts finds alternative homes, new families and lifelong friendships in the streets and houses of dynamic 1970s London. As she wanders through the city she loves, her journeys inspire and merge with inner ones. London is marching, creating and performing - and Michèle Roberts is at the very heart of it. From Spare Rib to publishing her first book, Paper Houses is in part the story of finding a space - and learning to share it - in houses from Holloway and Peckham to Regent's Park and Notting Hill Gate. Accounts of communal living fill dozens of colourful notebooks, but her all-consuming longing to write also causes conflict in her relationships and financial issues that lead her to a nomadic urban existence. Love, feminist ideals and the legacy of a Catholic upbringing don't always sit so happily together, be it in London or on her escape adventures in Bangkok, Bali, Italy . . . Paper Houses provides both a powerful rendering of a time and an insight into the mind of a unique and talented writer.
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A Piece of the Night (London: The Women's Press, 1978)
Julie tries hard to be the dutiful daughter, the perfect wife and mother, but underneath she knows the darker, more passionate side of her psyche is struggling to be free. Among so many conventional female roles, can Julie invent one which is truly her own? A landmark classic of modern fiction, Michèle Roberts's first novel looks at women's search for 'stories that will not put them to sleep'.
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The Visitation (London: The Women's Press, 1983)
Helen's love affairs begin with questions about how men and women love each other and are divided from each other, and turn into journeys towards knowledge. Using the image of the twins, The Visitation explores gender difference, female sexuality, the quest for honesty and creativity, the clash between making art and getting politically involved. This painful and often funny novel captures young women's struggles to love with integrity.
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The Wild Girl (London: Methuen, 1984)
This daring novel takes on the misogyny at the heart of historical Christianity and re-writes the New Testament. Embodying a fifth Gospel, by Mary Magdalene, The Wild Girl leaps over the religion-induced splits in women's psyches and reintegrates creativity, sexuality, maternity, power. Mary Magdalene is no longer the repentant whore of legend but a prophet, heretic, and mystic, the lover of Jesus, a heroine who envisions a Christianity that puts women at its heart.
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The Book of Mrs Noah (London: Methuen, 1987)
Visiting Venice and longing for a child in a marriage that seems to be sinking like the beautiful city she wanders through, a woman imagines a fantastical ark. Here, not animals but writers and books are the precious cargo. The wickedly funny and irreverent Sibyls spin their tales to God the Father (otherwise known as the Gaffer- one who makes gaffes). The stories form a journey through the ages of women's experience and Mrs Noah herself has much to learn.
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In the Red Kitchen (London: Methuen, 1990)
Victorian England, ancient Egypt and contemporary London fit together like pieces in a jigsaw. Intertwined narratives by different women plait the centuries together and take us time-travelling. Can we know, hear, see the dead? How do their stories reach us? Flora Milk, a young nineteenth-century medium, haunted by an Egyptian Queen who becomes a Pharoah, haunts in her turn the old terraced house that Hattie is trying to restore. Secrets leak from the walls. Lies drive one woman towards madness. The local cemetery holds the clues.
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Daughters of the House (London: Virago: 1992)
Therese and Leonie grow up in post-war Normandy at a time when France is struggling to come to terms with the legacy of war, from collaboration to loss. Villagers draw a veil over the past, graves in the woods are forgotten, and even the family farmhouse, occupied during the war, hides secrets. The two girls pick their way through adults' silences and evasions, but, when they each have a vision in the woods, they find themselves at variance with each other. Whose story will be believed? Whose version of the truth will prevail?
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Flesh and Blood (London: Virago, 1994)
This vividly experimental novel breaks the traditional line of narrative in two, to demonstrate the pain of a broken relationship between mother and daughter. The reader mends this split by reading the halved stories and putting them back together, following Freddy's quest backwards through history and then forwards again. Reading becomes, entertainingly, like doing up a zip; and the characters certainly enjoy slipping in and out of each other's clothes and stories.
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Impossible Saints (London: Little, Brown, 1997)
Josephine has written her official Life to placate the authoritarian Inquisitors, but her real thoughts, her complex visions of her new convent and Rule, remain hidden. The Church cannot tolerate women who are both holy and sexy. Josephine's full story will die with her. Her niece Isabel, griefstricken and desperate to find her own way, begins to collect leftover scraps of Josephine's writing, her relics. She pieces together a new version of Josephine that doesn't fit the official one. Throughout Josephine's story are strung fantastical, impossible and irreverent 'lives' of re-imagined saints, like the golden beads on the rosary Josephine has left to Isabel to guide her.
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Fair Exchange (London: Little, Brown, 1999)
This witty homage to romantic historical fiction operates to subvert it. Inspired by the lives of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and radical poet Wordsworth, it looks at how the French Revolution put into question traditional expectations around love, romance, education and the upbringing of children. The novel is also inspired by thrillers: the gripping mystery of identity at its heart is revealed only in the last few pages.
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The Looking Glass (London: Little, Brown, 2000)
Genevieve is a homeless orphan, very much in the tradition of Jane Eyre, searching for a home even as she is driven out of one house after the other. She finds shelter in the household of a poet, Gerard, a figure inspired by the biographies of both Flaubert and Mallarme. All the women in Gerard's life start to compare stories, with startling and subversive results. Set in Normandy just before the First World War, the novel explores the relationship of history to myth and how these come together in secret, subterranean worlds.
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The Mistressclass (London: Little, Brown, 2002)
What happens when a young female student falls in love with a charismatic, older male teacher? Imbalances of power are at the heart of this troubling novel, which compares a contemporary love triangle with the situation of Charlotte Bronte vis-à-vis her tutor in Brussels, Monsieur Heger. Charlotte writes passionate letters from beyond the grave. Vinny, in the present, is haunted by the ghosts of London's writers. Masculine sexuality and masculine vulnerability, in the shape of Adam, Vinny's ex-lover, are held up to the light and examined.
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During Mother's Absence (London: Virago, 1993)
When the cat's away the mice will play. This collection of short stories looks at absent mothers and the legacies they bestow for good and bad.
A mother grieves over the shoes her runaway daughter has left behind, and painfully recognises her part in that daughter's flight. A single mother escapes to France for food and sex. A teenage girl whose mother has died tracks her in dreams. All the stories explore the figure of the mother as a muse for artists.
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