Michèle Roberts: histories and herstories in In the Red Kitchen, Fair Exchange and The Looking Glass

Michèle Roberts’s work has always displayed a concern for the past, whether this is in the form of personal memory and a subsequent sense of subjectivity or shared cultural experiences. From The Wild Girl (1984) to The Mistressclass (2003), Roberts’s novels engage creatively with the contemporary debate about the place of women in history and the ways in which women can tell their own histories. Julia Tofantšuk argues in Chapter 4 of this book that ‘feminist theory has long distinguished between history and herstory’ (p. 59), and Roberts’s work can clearly be defined using the latter term. In line with Linda Anderson’s argument that any attempt by women to reclaim history must make clear the way that ‘existence is textually mediated’, in order to avoid ‘simply reconstituting reality as it is’, Roberts’s engagements with history refuse to work within the confines of traditional historical binaries of truth and lies, reason and irrationality.1 All of Roberts’s historical and mythical reconfigurations are notable for their insistence upon the textual nature of any remake and the inability to ‘tell the truth’ in any narrative, questioning the processes of both history and historical retelling. In In the Red Kitchen (1990), Fair Exchange (1999) and The Looking Glass (2000), Roberts takes such disparate figures as an Egyptian pharaoh, William Wordsworth and Gustave Flaubert and produces versions of people and events which revise and question historical record, destabilizing the notions of authority and truth, and encouraging instability in narrative, and therefore in history.2