Going Down in Herstory: Re-writing Women’s Lives in Michèle Roberts’s “On the Beach at Trouville”

Abstract

Throughout her writing career, Michèle Roberts has been one of the contemporary women writers who has re-constructed and retold the lives of previously forgotten, silenced or marginalised women. In an attempt to re-inscribe their voice, Roberts has re-written history from the female perspective by going back to the lives of female saints, Biblical figures and other female writers. In her last collection of short stories: Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, all the protagonists are women taken from historical or literary texts, to whom she has given voice, providing the reader with new visions of reality. This paper will focus on “On the Beach at Trouville”, and will analyse the strategies Roberts has used both to present the lives of Thérèse of Lisieux and Camille Monet from their own perspectives and to subvert the patriarchal construction of history.