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

(1999) and

(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

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

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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 23 November 2024.]