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The Book of Mrs Noah. London: Vintage, 1987.

      DH Daughters of the House. London: Virago, 1992.

      ET “Epilogue.” In Tales I Tell My Mother: A Collection of Feminist Short Stories, by

       Zoë Fairbairns et al. London: Journeyman, 1978.

      FB Flesh and Blood. London: Virago, 1994.

      FE Fair Exchange. London: Virago, 1999.

      FSG Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration and Writing. London: Virago, 1998.

      GCG with Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah F. Sawyer, “‘Getting A/cross God’:

       An Interview with Michèle Roberts.” In Reading Spiritualities: Constructing

       and Representing the Sacred, edited by Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah F.

       Sawyer, 15–25. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

      IBR with Patricia Bastida Rodríguez. “On Women, Christianity and History:

       An Interview with Michèle Roberts.” Atlantis 25/1 (2003) 93–107.

      IGS with María Soraya García Sánchez. “Talking About Women, History and

       Writing with Michèle Roberts.” Atlantis 27/2 (2005) 137–47.

      IJN with Jenny Newman. “An Interview with Michèle Roberts.” Cercles, 2003.

       No pages. Online: http://www.cercles.com/interviews/roberts.html

      IS Impossible Saints. London: Virago, 1997.

      LG The Looking Glass. London: Virago, 2000.

      MC The Mistressclass. London: Virago, 2004.

      MMT “Martha and Mary Raise Consciousness from the Dead.” In Tales I Tell My

       Mother: A Collection of Feminist Short Stories, by Zoë Fairbairns et al, 71–79.

       London: Journeyman, 1978.

      MSL Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. London: Virago, 2010.

      PH Paper Houses: A Memoir of the ’70s and Beyond. London: Virago, 2008.

      PN A Piece of the Night. London: The Women’s Press, 1978.

      PS Playing Sardines. London: Virago, 2001.

      RMH Reader, I Married Him. London: Virago, 2006.

      RK In the Red Kitchen. London: Minerva, 1990.

      TV The Visitation. London: The Women’s Press, 1983.

      UG “Une Glossaire/A Glossary.” In More Tales I Tell My Mother, by Zoë Fairbairns

       et al, 41–80. London: Journeyman, 1987.

      WG The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Original edition: The Wild Girl, 1984.

       London: Vintage, 2007.

      WWH “The Woman Who Wanted to Be a Hero.” In Walking on the Water: Women

       Talk About Spirituality, edited by Jo Garcia and Sara Maitland, 50–65. London:

       Virago, 1983.

      Introduction

      “The Beauty of the Bones”

      Nobody knew to whom these scrap bones belonged. They had been sorted and classified simply according to shape and appearance, then made into a mosaic . . . constructed of square wooden frames, each packed tight with a particular arrangement of bones, that, placed together formed a precise and repeated abstract pattern of straight lines, rosette, and mandalas. Only on a second glance did you realise that what you were looking at were massed tibias, fibulas, and femurs, with here and there a skull and crossbones for added decoration, or a prayer superimposed in bone letters in a language nobody could understand.

      Isabel brought her granddaughter to see it. The child, frowning and black-haired, imagined the architects of this place as busy cooks inventing recipes, sorting and arranging, putting certain bones into the gold cupboards as you’d put joints of meat into larders, and setting some aside, to be boiled down for other uses, soup, perhaps, or glue. They were artists, surely. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, each with a lapful of bones, braiding them together like crochet, rearticulating them into fantastic shapes, making them speak like poetry. Fitting them into the square trays, according to the designs they’d worked out . . .

Bones pictures, arranged row on row, so that your eye could travel over them vertically or horizontally or both at once. You could see all the layers of bones, and you could see each individual bone; the part and the whole. The patterns were severe and mysterious. No one could say what they meant. What you saw was the overall dance of shapes. The beauty of the bones.1

Perhaps due to feminism’s emphasis on theory that is practical and embodied, feminist engagement with literature and with theology has often envisioned its work in terms of material objects. When Adrienne Rich defined “feminist revisioning” as “the act of looking back” in order “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us,”2 this was given poetic form in “Diving into the Wreck.” The feminist artist becomes an underwater explorer, seeking to find amongst the debris of patriarchy “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.”3 Alicia Ostriker reads in women’s poetry a “shared plundering” of the jewels that are worth keeping from patriarchy’s treasure trove of symbols and stories.4 Ann Loades uses the metaphor of “searching for lost coins,” from the parable of Luke 15:8–10, in which God’s care for sinners is likened to a woman sweeping the house, diligently seeking the one drachma she has lost.5 Feminist theologians find few whole and untarnished objects amidst the fundamentally androcentric Christian tradition, and thus a large part of their work is to remodel into new shapes the symbols and stories from which that tradition is made.6 The task of feminist critique and reinvention of a cultural heritage that is fundamentally patriarchal is not just a matter of scavenging and rebuilding; first there has to be the dismantling and deconstructing.

Both the constructive and reconstructive task of feminist critique are represented in the image of quilting. Drawn to material metaphors that pertain to the domestic arts, “women’s work,” feminist theology has often described itself in terms of spinning and weaving,7 but it is the image of quilting that encapsulates the feminist project of seeking “to articulate new patterns from bits of contemporary experiences and ancient sources.”8 As an often communal activity that makes a new object from scraps of old cloth, quilting provides a symbol of women constructing together something new from fragments of experience and scraps of doctrinal and textual traditions. Rebecca Chopp writes that metaphors of quilting “underscore the history of women’s lives in western culture, but also . . . locate the very identity of theology in the context of functional warmth, of common beauty, of daily practices.”9 Quilting can serve as a symbol for feminist piecing together of the religious symbols that it has torn apart, but also of the process of tearing apart itself. There is pleasure to be had in playing with the pieces, in making something new from the old. In the metaphor of quilting there is an appropriate violence to the cutting up and stitching together of fabric, and it is an act of re-creation that does not try to conceal the origins of its constituent parts, nor the differences between them, when in the early days of feminist theology there seemed to be the hope that feminist theology could rebuild patriarchal religious tradition into a new and systematized construction.10

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