a non-fiction piece which begins with her discussing her feelings about the brief for the essay, and whether to write it or not.96 This device is also used in Arky Types, in which the ‘characters’ Sara and Michelene write to each other debating how to write a novel together. In Maitland’s writing in the first person, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are blurred: “A Feminist Writer’s Progress” describes in story form her experience as a feminist writer, with a footnote that reads “[w]hether, and in what ways, you believe any of this is, of course, entirely up to you, but remember always that the writer is a writer of fictions and too literal or chronological a belief may prove dangerous to your health.”97 In the theological book, A Big-Enough God, she says of her account of becoming a feminist and a Christian, “I at least am convinced by my own narrative.”98
Although Maitland’s distinctive voice—witty, passionate, eccentric—is what makes her self so present in her writing, the personal narrative that has come to define her in recent years is her embracing of that which may seem antithetical to ‘voice’: silence. This is not just because her most extended work of life-writing, A Book of Silence, is a book about silence which interweaves her story with her thought and research on silence, rather than a straightforward autobiography, nor even because that book and Maitland’s discussion of it have proved so popular with the wider public. Rather, it is because Maitland has come to understand herself as a seeker of silence; the story of her life flowing towards silence. This has had interesting implications for her consideration of herself as a writer. During the last decade, she found that she was not writing fiction any more:
When I had come north it had been with a sense that the stories were not enough—I wanted to dig deeper into them, to pull more out of them. It had not occurred to me that I would abandon them, nor they me. The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and felt integral to my sense of well-being, even identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply stories did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way “lost the plot.”99
Although Maitland has written a number of acclaimed short stories since embarking on a predominately silent lifestyle, she doubts that she will write another novel. Considering why this is, she notes that, historically, silent living has given rise to great poetry and non-fiction, but not to fiction, especially novels: “[p]erhaps it is because fiction involves creating whole new worlds and this requires a greater assertion of the ego than recording what comes, as a gift, into your own silent life.”100 On the other hand, the sense of self that comes across so clearly in Maitland’s writing and interviews has perhaps been strengthened by silence; she comments that writers who live silently, even those “who build in a rhetoric of self-abnegation . . . end up writing autobiographically.”101 Maitland’s love of silence has led her to consider deeply the nature of language and narrative—these things that structure human experience and yet are opposite to the silence she finds so profoundly fulfilling. Novels (at least the kind of novels that Maitland once wrote) involve “narrative, plot and resolution or closure, all of which are linear or time-bound and therefore deeply alien to silence.”102 Maitland’s account of silence, repeatedly retold in articles, interviews and speaking engagements, is both a narrative she has constructed, and a way of being that is resistant to narrative, especially narrative closure. This is something that comes to the fore in the final paragraph of A Book of Silence:
I am finding it hard to finish this book, because I don’t feel that I am at the end of anything. Back in Warkton, at the very beginning, I tried to design a garden that would open out into infinity; that would forgo the satisfaction of closure, in the hope of finding the jouissance of the unresolved, the open-ended. Now I am trying to design a whole life that will do that. For me silence is both the instrument and content of that life.103
Michèle Roberts’s Life Story
If Sara Maitland’s writing of her self comes to be defined by silence, Michèle Roberts’s is in some ways the very opposite: being a writer is absolutely essential to her sense of self, and is a theme of nearly all her fiction. Roberts is a particularly interesting writer to consider in terms of autobiography, because her self-writing is entwined with her theorization of the process of doing so. The self that Michèle Roberts discloses—or narrates—in her writing and interviews is projected clearly, and in bright colors. This autobiographical fiction is not stable, and flickers in and out of her novels, taking a different guise when read in the light of her memoirs, but it is indisputably there, throughout all her work.
Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 to a French mother and an English father. She has a brother and two sisters, one of which is her twin. Roberts’s childhood was divided between Edgware in Surrey and summers in rural Normandy, and her potted biographies usually open with the information that she is “half-French,” making this detail significant to her identity as a writer, despite the fact that all her published works are in English. Her fiction is sometimes set in France, but usually involves a character that is in some way both French and English, or else an English person living in France or vice-versa. In an interview with Jenny Newman, Roberts describes how growing up with the feeling of “having two families and two homes, and [having] to move back and forth across the sea to join them up” was an important impetus for becoming a writer.104 The awkwardness of growing up not-quite English and not-quite French—the dual identity that results from being raised in two places, two cultures, divided by language and by the sea—is given to Roberts’s protagonists Julie in A Piece of the Night and Léonie in Daughters of the House, and explored autobiographically in “Une Glossaire/A Glossary.” In the latter, the division is represented linguistically—with each section headed by a French word and its English meaning—by the oblique between the two languages. Roberts’s repeated recreation of a childhood in rural Normandy—particularly evocative of the material and domestic—represents the attempt to restore a sense of closeness to her mother. Childhood is also an important aspect of Roberts’s writing because “[w]hen you’re young, you’re very open to the world, you’re vulnerable, you’re soft-shelled. I think your childhood stamps you, wounds you, shapes you . . . you struggle to turn it into language and make something of it.”105
The childhood “wound” that opens again and again in Roberts’s writing is the Roman Catholicism she inherited from her mother and from convent school. She describes its influence as all-pervasive: “as integral as the blood in my veins, passed on to me by my mother like milk. Catholicism was a language itself: a complete system of images, and such a rich one, within which to live and name the world.”106 Roberts had been devoutly religious as a child, and believed she had a vocation to become a nun, but lost her faith once leaving home and going to university.107 Looking back—in anger—on her religious childhood and adolescence, she came to regard church teaching on women, sexuality, sin, and judgment as a cause of great harm: “the Catholic split between body and soul . . . damaged me almost irreparably, I would say, as a young woman growing up, because it made me feel so bad about desire, sex, pleasure, myself, my own body. Part of what my work’s been trying to do is to repair damage.”108
Thus a devout young girl’s struggle with Catholicism and sexuality appears again and again in Roberts’s
