Michele Roberts

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Roberts, Michèle (1949– ), novelist and poet, born in Hertfordshire, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. A leading literary writer of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, she was poetry editor of the feminist magazine Spare Rib (1975–7). Her first novel, A Piece of the Night (1978), introduced themes that were to inform her later work: the heroine, French-born but English convent- educated, meditates on her French childhood, her Oxford experiences, marriage and motherhood, female friendship, and her struggle for independence. Subsequent novels include The Visitation (1983); The Wild Girl (1984); The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), set partly in Venice and partly on a surreal voyage in a Women's Ark, where women writers create their own dream environment; In the Red Kitchen (1990); Daughters of the House (1992); and The Mistressclass (2003). Other works include During Mother's Absence (1993, short stories); volumes of poetry, including All the Selves I Was: New and Selected Poems (1995); Flesh and Blood (1994), a series of parodistic, highly coloured erotic-historical stories; and Impossible Saints (1997), inspired in part by the life of St Teresa of Avila. Both her poetry and her prose are distinguished by a warm, sensuous richness, and a use of classical and biblical legend.