Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk
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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 narrative is addressed to: “[y]our cufflinks and loose change share a big yellow Pernod ashtray with my watch and brooches.”122 The house in which Roberts first lived with Jim was divided between him and his ex-wife, so their sons could live with both of them; ideas of “the house as repaired body, as metamorphosing body” also inspired In the Red Kitchen, “which circled around haunting, breakages and secrets.”123 These themes—and the importance of the house—were carried over into Daughters of the House, written “out of a sudden need to think about where I came from (parents and politics), about the Second World War’s impact on civilians in occupied France, about collaboration.”124
Daughters of the House—with its clearer storytelling that Roberts attributes to her relationship with Jim—was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the WH Smith Literary Award. With the resulting increased sales and prize money, Roberts could afford to buy her own home, and she opted for a house in France, in order to reconnect with her French side, associated with her mother. Roberts’s mother had reacted angrily to her fiction, and their relationship had been difficult for many years, but around this time they “reached an oasis. We felt able to express our love for each other. We forgave each other. A miracle in the desert.”125
Roberts would come to terms with the trauma of another familial relationship—that with her father—staying in the childhood home in France after the death of her aunt, haunted by “a projection of old childhood fears and desires.”126 She explains,
What came up for me, the ghoul that haunted me . . . was the strong feelings I’d had in this house for my father. At puberty, aged ten, I was madly in love with him, flirted with him, competed with my mother for his attention. I didn’t know this was normal, that little girls routinely fall in love with their dads. Catholicism taught that sex before marriage was wicked. Sexual feelings in a child of ten were therefore of course very wicked indeed, and sexual feelings for my father were wickedest of all.127
Impossible Saints, written shortly before her father died, was the novel through which Roberts grappled with the complexities of the father-daughter relationship, and its guise in patriarchal religion. The main narrative, of Josephine, features a father-daughter relationship with hints of incestuous desires, but it is in the short narratives of a multitude of women saints that “we get various ways in which the daughter fights her father, loves him, flirts with him, gets raped by him.”128 Roberts felt that Impossible Saints was a “breakthrough novel”129 not only in terms of her father, but also as regards religion. Her works of fiction that followed—Fair Exchange, The Looking