THE MISTRESSCLASS
MICHELE ROBERTS
VIRAGO

The Mistressclass is, as you might guess, about the relationship between love and art. Vinny and Catherine, sisters and writers, are both in love with Adam, the son of a powerful older painter, Robert. Vinny is the first to become Adam’s lover, and even in her fifties remains heartbroken at his defection to Catherine in the 1970s while all four were on holiday in France. Catherine and Adam have just inherited Robert’s Holloway house and are holding a party to celebrate their possession of it. Inevitably, the party leads to a confrontation between the sisters. Out of this love triangle, Michele Roberts has created a powerful, sensual novel as redolent of death as of life.

Roberts has always been good at describing women, and here Vinny and Catherine, while effectively two sides of one person “like Snow White and Rose Red” are particularly enjoyable as portraits of femmes d’un certain age. The men, especially Adam – a depressed novelist with writer’s block – are also well-drawn, even if making everyone artistic seems a bit too easy. Vinny was an ardent young feminist and is now a slightly dotty older one, a poet shameless about stealing white lilac from a front garden, or throwing an effigy into the Thames as a piece of installation art and creating alarm. Childless, bold, and somewhat child-like she is the truer artist than her sister, who lectures on English literature and writes women’s pornography to pay for her designer clothes and other luxuries: “The coat was Italian. Very expensive. She had written an extra novella to pay for it. Porn, really, but aimed at women and so called erotica. All she had to do was keep on thinking of new ways of combining fucking with being hurt. Crown of Spikes had paid for her haircut. Madame Punishment had bought her shoes.”

The comedy in The Mistressclass is, similarly, laced with pain though not with porn. Roberts’s great gift for describing the world of the senses so vividly that reading her is rather like walking into an Impressionist painting is underlined by a sharp literary intelligence concerning what art could and should do. To read this novel is to be reminded that the 1970s were a time of revolution in the arts as well as politics, and the debate between Vinny and the other characters is engaging. Vinny, of course, clashes with Adam’s father as the wilier Catherine does not, and it is she who, at the climax of the party, betrays the identity of the ecstatic nude painted by Robert. Catherine, so much more conventional on the outside, was Robert’s muse and secret model, and the discovery of this destroys her marriage and possibly her husband’s life. If the first part of the novel, describing the build-up to Catherine and Adam’s party, is strongly influenced by Mrs. Dalloway, the second is pure gothic with the ghost of Adam’s dead father and possibly Adam himself haunting the remaining characters.

Framing the modern love-story, and alternately interlinked with its chapters, are letters from Charlotte Bronte written to M. Heger, the Brussels headmaster who inspired both The Professor and Villette. The real letters, to which Heger never responded, survive because his wife carefully collected their torn-up pieces and stitched them together. Roberts recreates Charlotte’s madness, wildness, ferocious sexuality and despair with convincing assurance and brio. The link between these and the modern-day story is thematic – Catherine is lecturing on Wild Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s novel about Mr. Rochester’s first wife, the characters all travel back and forth between England and France – and somewhat tenuous in terms of the narrative. For some, this may prove irritating; for others it’s like getting two novels for the price of one. Love triangles are never easy to read about, and this rich, dramatic, dream-like story is a particularly fine example of both its weakness and its strength

The Independent on Sunday, April.