SOURCE: Hanson, Clare. “During Mother's Absence: The Fiction of Michèle Roberts.” In British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock, pp. 229-47. London: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Hanson discusses the recurring theme of mother-daughter relationships in Roberts's novels and short stories.

Michèle Roberts is one of the most interesting and accomplished writers working in English. Her fiction is vivid, sensuous, and imaginative, its formal inventiveness matching the richness of her vision and insight. Roberts explores many of the key issues facing women today, but from the perspective of a woman half-English and half-French, split between nations and identities. She was born in 1949, the daughter of a French mother and an English father, and has published to date nine novels, two volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her first novel, A Piece of the Night (1978), was the first...