A Piece of the Night, Helen in The Visitation and Thérèse in Daughters of the House. Thirteen-year-old Thérèse, who wants to be a nun, copes with her mother’s terminal cancer by focusing on the purity of piety: “she lay on the floor in the shape of a cross, and prayed. . .What comforted her, when from time to time she opened her eyes and squinted upwards, was the sight of her statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Madonna with a heavenly look, a light veil over her fair hair, blue sash about her girlish waist.”109 Yet this is disturbed by her developing body: “[s]he hated her stomach which stuck out as though she were pregnant however hard she tried to suck it in. She hated her breasts.”110 This echoes Roberts’s own experience of adolescence and the onset of menstruation,111 of seeing herself as female within a church whose symbolism denies the physicality of womanhood. For Julie at convent school on the feast day of Joseph the worker, dedicated to the Virgin: “[t]his is our day, the little girls’ day, when we sing of pearls, of lilies, of bleeding hearts, of secret soft places visited by God. Only my hands are slimy with heat and perspiration, there is a sanitary towel strapped like a dead rabbit between my legs.”112 In The Visitation the conflict between the church and teenage sexuality is played out in Helen’s guilt at kissing a boy at the church youth club dance; her twin brother and her friend caught having sex in her father’s car headlights, the priest calling them whores. That night she thinks of how “[t]he nuns teach her how to compose herself for sleep: lie on your back, arms folded across your breast, and think of the four last things. Death, judgment, heaven and hell.”113
Having moved away from religious faith, Roberts’s teenage spiritual fervor was channeled into the desire to be a writer; a parallel she draws explicitly: “I lost my religious vocation easily, in my first term at Somerville [College, Oxford], standing on the staircase outside the college library cradling copies of Paradise Lost and Beowulf . . . I realised that nuns were not allowed to stay up all night reading. Very well, then. Don’t be a nun. That was that.”114 This narrative of having exchanged God for books would be told in terms of swapping one vocation for another: from being a nun to being a writer. Yet Roberts acknowledges the relationship between her Catholic heritage and the desire to write, because of the images and stories integral to the Catholic tradition, the women saints she learnt about at convent school, and the medieval mystics she studied at university. The image of saint as writer and writer as saint is a significant motif throughout her work.
The sense of vocation—including a willed poverty—took her to London after university, to write and train to be a librarian at the British Museum. Her experience working in the Department of Printed Books feeds into the image at the heart of The Book of Mrs Noah, of the Ark as a great library for women; her relationship to the physical presence of ancient printed books is echoed in the mystical heretical scrolls of Impossible Saints.115 She remembers “[s]preading my hands over the thick paper of the pages, I knew that knowledge was physical . . . Books were material; like beloved bodies; provided not only intellectual but also sensual delight. I could touch them, open them, caress them, feed from them.”116 Roberts portrays her wanderings around London with an equal sense of physical intimacy: “[t]he city was like one of the manuscripts I studied at the British Museum. Layer upon layer of history lay quietly underneath the current written surface; not gone but just forgotten; biding its time. The city held memory in its very stones and bricks.”117
Although Roberts had been witness to radical politics and the spirit of 1968 while an undergraduate at Oxford, it was in London in the early 1970s that her commitment to socialism and feminism was to flourish. Through her friend Alison Fell, she became part of a feminist street theatre group, whose acts of protest were “carnivalesque and amusing”118 and went to consciousness-raising group meetings. The development of feminist identity, and friendship, is an important aspect of A Piece of the Night, Roberts’s first novel. It describes a rural French childhood and Oxford university education, and the fermenting of feminist consciousness, against the backdrop of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, couched in psychoanalytic terms.
A Piece of the Night also relates the tensions and difficulties of experiments in communal living, which Roberts experienced in a collective household headed by Alison Fell’s husband. The guilt she felt at her inability to live this way, without possessions or even a room of her own, led her to draw parallels between this politically idealistic lifestyle and her childhood religious vocation: “[l]ooking back, I think I was like a young nun making up her mind to leave the convent: how difficult to go against a community you have chosen, ferociously loved and supported and now criticise. You feel you are betraying them.”119 Shortly after leaving and renting a flat, the unease caused by not having the safe and conventional lifestyle expected by her middle-class family led her to go and work at the British Council in Bangkok for a period, which features in The Visitation. On her return to London, Roberts worked for the Pregnancy Advisory Board, and was a clerk for a sociological research unit. At the same time she was deeply involved with the feminist literary community, publishing poetry with Judith Kazantzis and Alison Fell, and short fiction as part of the Women Writers Collective. Roberts was the poetry editor of Spare Rib, the magazine of the women’s liberation movement in the UK. A Piece of the Night was the first novel to be published by The Women’s Press.
The Visitation, Roberts’s second novel, contends with being a writer, a twin (as Roberts is), the death of her beloved English grandmother, the joys and struggles of female friendship and the possibility of heterosexual love. Both A Piece of the Night and The Visitation are saturated with Jungian ideas on archetypes and the search for integration and wholeness. Jungian thought was to be even more prevalent in The Wild Girl, which Roberts has explained as her altered view of herself once she got married in 1983: “[t]he novel had been sparked off by my transition from being single to being married. The Catholic Church taught that a single woman could not be both holy and sexual. Why not? Why did a woman have to be split in two? I began to re-imagine Christianity, to imagine a Christ who loved and listened to women.”120
Roberts had married an older man, a scholar of Renaissance architecture she had met at one of her poetry readings. The time spent immersed in Italy’s art, architecture and cuisine—and the loneliness and unease caused her by this marriage—are reflected in The Book of Mrs Noah and some of the short stories of Playing Sardines. The Book of Mrs Noah—which, like so many of Roberts’s works, is made up of lots of different stories—is threaded together by the voice of Mrs Noah, a woman staying in Venice while her husband researches architectural history, who has nothing to do except dive into her imagination. This novel explores the relationship between writing and motherhood, utilizing the Ark-library as an image of pregnancy—which Roberts relates to her experience of infertility.121 She accompanied her husband to Harvard, but at the end of the first academic year there she decided to leave him, and returned to London in time for the publication of The Book of Mrs Noah. Having achieved success as a writer, especially with The Wild Girl, she took up the post of Theatre Writer in Residence at Essex University.
At Essex, while working on an original play called The Journeywoman, she met the artist Jim Latter, who would become her second husband. Her happiness with him formed part of In the Red Kitchen, in which the character Hattie speaks in the second person to her lover, with whom she is making a home. As Hattie decorates their house, it becomes the embodiment of the contentment she has achieved, wrapped up with her love for the man her
