Michèle Roberts, The Mistress Class

Sarah Falcus (Hamamatsu University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of Glasgow), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2001

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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The Mistressclass

again demonstrates Roberts’s interest in complex and multilayered narratives, with an epistolary thread combined with a third-person narrative using multiple points of view. The letters are imaginative reconstructions of those sent by Charlotte Brontë to her teacher and mentor, M. Heger, in Brussels, linking this text to the rewriting of literary figures already seen in

Fair Exchange

(1999) and

The Looking Glass

(2000). As in several of her other works, Roberts does not insist upon a historically accurate rendering of events, but creates a fictional narrative saturated with grief and longing. Further intertextuality is also apparent in the novel, with references to fairytales, to

Jane Eyre

and, in the party, flower buying and the primacy of London itself, to Woolf’s

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2533 words

Citation: Falcus, Sarah. "The Mistress Class". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 July 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10501, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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