spiritual autobiography, describing Roberts’s “journey” to “wholeness.”140 The childhood mystical experiences of interconnection attested to here may also be read in The Wild Girl: “suddenly, with no warning, the world was utterly transformed . . . [t]he universe breathed in and out and I dissolved in it, no longer I . . . This world shimmered and danced and changed constantly, and I, the not-I, was part of it, and understood it, and was it.”141
Although the novel draws on patristic and gnostic texts, Mary’s narration is more akin to that of spiritual autobiography than a gospel. The Book of Mrs Noah features the spiritual autobiography of a nun awaiting the results of a trial for heresy, relating her movement from a guilt-ridden, self-hating religion to a creation and birth-centered spirituality, influenced by (a fictionalized) Marguerite de Porete and the Heresy of the Free Spirit. The struggles of historical women mystics to transmit their ideas, sometimes directly defying the religious authorities, at other times employing cunning strategies of collaboration, are celebrated by Roberts,142 especially in Impossible Saints. Yet this novel, and Daughters of the House, also suggest that women’s spiritual autobiographies are not innocent. In Impossible Saints, Sister Josephine (Roberts’s reimagining of Teresa of Avila) writes a version of her Life that coheres with approved dogma, in order to escape the suspicion of the Inquisition: “[s]he had danced their prescribed dance and performed their set gestures, had sung their recommended song, and received their polite applause.”143 The character of Thérèse in Daughters of the House is inspired by Thérèse of Lisieux, whose posthumous spiritual autobiography The Story of a Soul was exceptionally popular and ensured her canonization in 1925. Roberts’s Thérèse, the pious child who became a nun in the wake of family trauma and secrets, writes her autobiography, “the story of a soul”144 twenty years after leaving home: “I thought if I wrote what happened when we were children it would help me to decide what it is I’ve got to do.”145 Léonie reacts thus: “if you tell any more lies about the past I’ll kill you . . . You always were good at making things up . . . in your version I was the sinner and you were the saint . . . Yours will be the Authorised Version of what happened won’t it.”146 Roberts’s exploration of “a woman’s dodgy desire to control a story”147 in the characters of Léonie and Thérèse, perhaps expresses in fiction an ambivalence about life-writing that does not come across in her interviews and non-fiction. In Daughters of the House there is a sense that the healing and redemption that Roberts elsewhere ascribes to writing is not achieved easily, or without cost.
A sense of redemption through writing comes across in Roberts’s words in 1983: “I became a writer through sheer necessity. I desperately needed to describe experience in order not to be overwhelmed by it, to name the conflicts inside myself, to imagine solutions to them.”148 She often describes her novels as attempts at solving a particular problem, for example A Piece of the Night asks “what is a woman?” and The Visitation, “[h]ow do men and women love each other?”149 This is couched in terms of her relationships—for example Impossible Saints is concerned with her father; A Piece of the Night and Flesh and Blood are about the mother-daughter relationship. Writing about conflicts in relationships may bring further division rather than healing, because, as for Léonie and Thérèse, “versions clash.”150 Roberts’s mother hated A Piece of the Night, “finding it ugly, cruel and disgusting, and believed I had written it deliberately wanting to hurt her.”151 Novels cannot bring ultimate healing or redemption, and so for Roberts similar themes are brought up again and again; the “sense of constant failure, of not getting something good enough or beautiful enough” results in the writing of “another novel and another and another.”152 Psychoanalytic ideas about artistic creation as the attempt to make reparation for the loss of connection with the mother’s body have an important role in Roberts’s conception of writing. But there can be no final restoration to the primordial paradise, only the repeated attempt to cope with the anger and emptiness felt at its loss: “[w]e re-create the mother inside ourselves, over and over again.”153 Thus the healing, or redemption, brought about by writing one’s life or self is not final or complete, but nonetheless deeply valuable.
Annunciation: Writing the Self as Birthing the Self
Speaking about the lack of finality and need for multiple attempts in writing novels to solve problems, Roberts comments, “I’m not saying I’m finding earth-shattering solutions, but I am interested in making the novel different every time,” for the same reasons that people have more than one child, and enjoy the differences between their children.154 Continuing the novel-as-child motif, she sees the way that each of her novels has been provoked, inspired or enabled in some way by another person in her life, as that person engendering a child with her: “a very problematic image to use—that making a book is like making a baby . . . but I think you could use pregnancy as an image, as a womanly creation . . . I haven’t had children myself—I was infertile—but I think I’ve had ten children by different people.”155
One of the reasons why this image is “problematic” for a woman novelist is related to the relationship between autobiography and fiction, what Domna Stanton refers to as “the age-old, pervasive decoding of all female writing as autobiographical.”156 Roberts has said that she is defensive when hers and other women novelists’ work is designated as “autobiographical,” as if to undermine the skill and artfulness of constructing a piece of writing.157 As Sidonie Smith suggests, men’s autobiography is viewed as “crafted,” whereas writing by women that is classified as “autobiographical” is “spontaneous” or “natural.”158 The conflation of women’s biology with their writing is satirized by Roberts in The Book of Mrs Noah in the character of the Gaffer, “Author of the Word of God”:
Women writers, well, they’re like leaky wombs, aren’t they, letting out the odd stream of verbiage, the odd undisciplined shriek. They don’t create. They just spill things out of that great empty space inside . . . It’s the male who represents humanity, creativity, spiritual quest, after all. How could a woman possibly do that? How could a mother know anything about human growth? Any fool can give birth. Writing a book is labour.159
Although there are troubling aspects to the image of writer-as-mother, the envisaging of the labor of writing a book as birth and childrearing has proved helpful to Roberts. Towards the end of The Book of Mrs Noah, a painting of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary is used to symbolize a woman’s act of creation in a way that collapses distinctions between the generativity of nature and the creative will of the Word. In the painting, Mary reads the story of Noah, while the angel speaks to her: “[m]editating on words, her half-shut eyes cast down, seeing nothing but the black marks on the white page, she conceives other words; new words. She creates the Word inside herself, by herself, using her own power . . . She is the Ark, the maker of the Word. She is the author.
