ABSTRACT
Michele Roberts has been associated, for more than a decade, with the famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia and she is Professor of Creative Writing there. Often described as a feminist novelist, Michele Roberts has nonetheless been quoted as expressing the hope that eventually there will be 'male writers and female writers, rather than as at present feminist writers and writers'. Like the work of most novelists of her calibre and ambition, Roberts's work has evolved and changed in the course of a career that extends over more than a quarter of a century but certain other themes and the means used to explore them have remained consistent. Drawing on Gnostic traditions that told of a sexual relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene, Roberts refashions the most familiar narrative in Western culture in ways that are both disorienting and rewarding.
