Michele (B.) Roberts Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Michele (B.) Roberts

Michèle Roberts, whose novel Daughters of the House (1992) won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, has been compared to major modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and her fiction has been studied alongside works by well-known contemporaries such as Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison. Despite such critical attention in her native Great Britain, Roberts is relatively unknown in the United States. Most of her novels and collections of poetry have been published in the United Kingdom, and translations of her novels are available throughout Europe, but those works published in the United States have not brought her the public and critical attention she deserves. Perhaps Roberts's stylistic experimentations, her refusal to offer her readers predictable plotlines, and her controversial subject matter have played a role in keeping her books on the margins of contemporary writing. Roberts's fiction explores the tangled and complex relationship between female sexuality and religion, and it does so from a deliberately subversive point of view influenced by the women's movement.

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