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
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
The collaborative Touch Papers, September 1982, included poems by JK , many of which had appeared already in such places as Spare Rib, Ambit, Tribune, Samphire, New Poetry, and—this...
Textual Production Alison Fell
AF joined with Stef Pixner , Michèle Roberts , Tina Reid , and Ann Oosthuizen in publishing with Sheba Feminist Publishers a poetry volume, Smile Smile Smile Smile.
Fell, Alison et al. Smile Smile Smile Smile. Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1980.
prelims
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1982
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
JK 's God, An Untitled Story appeared in God: an Anthology of Fiction, edited by Stephen Hayward and Sarah Lefanu in 1992. Other contributors included Michèle Roberts , Maureen Duffy , and Bapsi Sidhwa .
Textual Production Sara Maitland
Zoë Fairbairns , Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor together edited a volume of feminist fiction entitled Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1988–2003.
(1988)
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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...
Textual Production Sara Maitland
Zoë Fairbairns , Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor together edited a collection looking back more than a decade: More Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1988–2003.
(1988)
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
Together with Michèle Roberts , MW edited and introduced a collection of poetry by five women, Cutlasses & Earrings, published in the Playbooks series.
Dated from the Bodleian Library acquisition stamp.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
The Journeyman Press published Tales I Tell My Mother: A Collection of Feminist Short Stories, a collection of short stories by MW , Sara Maitland , Zoë Fairbairns , Michèle Roberts and Valerie Miner .
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1979
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
In the same year, she published a collection of poems entitled Touch Papers, jointly with Michèle Roberts and Judith Kazantzis . All three, she said, were feminists who were also convinced of the importance...
Textual Production Helen Dunmore
Though initially known as a poet, HD was always a prolific writer of prose. In her mid-twenties she worked on a couple of [autobiographical] novels . . . which fortunately stayed far back in the...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Roberts, Michèle. “Taking the P”. Guardian Unlimited.
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
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.