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life events
- Michele Roberts was born in 1949 to a French mother and an English father and brought up in Edgware, a suburb in North London.
- Her mother was Roman Catholic and Roberts was educated
at a convent school. The Catholic church had a deep influence
on her work - but was also something against which she reacted
powerfully.
- As a young girl, Roberts wanted to be a nun and live in a convent as a way of escaping the pressures around her.
- She went to Oxford University and there she finally allowed herself to escape the constraints of religion - she became a feminist, rejected her faith and decided to write.
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"The
way that women were treated in the religion I grew up
in, which was Catholicism, made me a writer -because women
were seen as the source of evil in the world, the source
of sin. We led men astray, we had to be forgiven for being
women before we even began to try and be good, we had
to get over having the bodies we had. This really pushed
me to wanting to write as a way of opposing what was very
constricting and actually painful in my life"
Michele Roberts |
Her
early novels are strongly autobiographical, drawing on her childhood
in England and France. A Piece of the Night was published
in 1978 and The Visitation in 1983. Some of her later
work is based more on fantasy - such as The Wild Girl
published in 1984.
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