The daughter of Monique Pauline Joseph Caulle and Reginald George Roberts, Michèle Brigitte Roberts was born on 20 May 1949 in Bushey, Hertfordshire, twenty minutes after her twin sister, Marguerite. She also had an older sister, Jacqueline, and a younger brother, Andrew. Her childhood was spent primarily in England, but she visited her mother's family in Normandy every summer. Her mother, who worked as a teacher, spoke French to her children and raised them in the Catholic faith. Thus, Roberts's upbringing was truly bilingual and bicultural. She wrote in 1983 that she "always wanted to be a writer" and started writing as a young child. Her descriptions of childhood in her later novels emphasize the idea of a lost paradise, an androgynous Eden in which little girls can be anything they want and do as they please. Roberts has described puberty as a "terrible shock," and for many of her heroines the onset of menstruation marks the end of freedom and the beginning of feminine repression by men.
Roberts attended convent school, a place she has revisited in several of her novels.
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