The Book of Mrs Noah is a novel by French-English author Michele Roberts. It is the story of a woman who visits Venice and begins to imagine that she is Noah's wife. The trip becomes less of a vacation and more of a journey of self-exploration and discovery. In Roberts' story, the ark is reclaimed by Mrs Noah, and Noah himself is relegated to the periphery of the tale. She fills her ark with other women - known as Sybils - who tell their own truth, spanning the globe, and the centuries. Biblical tales are rewritten and gradually a new Robertsian dystopia is created through the eyes of women who in the traditional telling of their narratives have been on the sidelines instead of in the center.
Roberts has always been a writer whose intention has been to break boundaries, and has expressed a belief that in order to write with passion one must also live passionately. Her feminism was awakened at an early age, while she was sick in bed with tonsilitis; an avid reader, she discovered Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which she now considers to be one of the original texts of feminist self-realization. She also felt a strong kinship with Jane, who, like her, was battling to find herself whilst constrained by a strict Roman Catholic upbringing. Despite leaving her Catholicism behind in a practical, intellectual sense, Roberts still had the images of her religion in her head, and used them to create The Book of Mrs Noah.
Before she was a novelist, Roberts formed a writers' collective with Zoe Fairbairns, Sara Maitland and Michelene Wandor, and was the poetry editor at feminist magazine Spare Rib. She subsequently moved to City Limits magazine after the publication of her first novel. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 for her novel Daughters of the House, she was awarded the W.H. Smith Award for Fiction for The Book of Mrs Noah, and was made a Chevelier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government; she turned down an Order of the British Empire due to her political position opposing the monarchy.
