Early Music History

This is a powerful and passionate story dealing with the perennial themes of desire, guilt and regret. Adam is an admired novelist, haunted by Robert, his recently deceased artist father - a dominant and domineering man. Catherine is Adam's wife who supplements her income by feverishly churning out tawdry pornographic novels in between conducting highbrow literary lectures. Her sister Vinny completes the trio. Like the others she is captivated by the written word and seeks to lose herself in her poetry, trying in vain to forget her first love. For a brief time in her late teens she was Adam's lover and then she lost him to Catherine. Overshadowing them all is the large painting hanging in the bedroom of Robert's house - a writhing female nude in the throes of ecstasy, her face deliberately blurred and transfigured by a highly charged, erotic grimace. Vinny and Catherine know who the woman is without asking. Adam doesn't know and never thinks to ask. The three move fluidly on their appointed journeys to self-discovery, shifting between contemporary London and provincial France and from the present into the past. Woven though the threads of their story is another, that of Charlotte Bronte's obsessive love for Monsieur Heger - the man credited with teaching her how to write. Michele Roberts is already a highly acclaimed author, a reputation The Mistressclass is bound to enhance. She has layered her novel with all the colours, shades and textures of an oil painting. There is a beautiful economy to her writing that can only serve to underscore the deep emotions that she portrays. This is a thought-provoking study of how impulsive actions in the past can cause serious reactions in the present day. (Kirkus UK)