The Mistressclass, by Michÿle Roberts

Joan Smith on a bold and stylish novelist tackling the splendours and miseries of love

As its title suggests, Michèle Roberts's new novel is about the things women learn from men. Catherine is married to Adam, a well-known writer who has not been able to write since the death of his father Robert, a flamboyant and successful artist. She is also, like the other women in the novel, the keeper of secrets: her relationship with Adam's father, memorialised in a painting that hangs in their bedroom, and her own career as the pseudonymous author of mildly pornographic novels.

Then there is Vinny, Catherine's sister, who met Adam first, lost him to Catherine during an emotionally charged holiday at Robert's house in France, and who remains in love with him almost three decades later. The novel opens with a chance meeting near the Millennium Bridge between Adam and Vinny, who is transporting an effigy of a woman to an arts festival on the South Bank. Losing the effigy to a gang of youths, who toss it into the river, Vinny unintentionally sparks off a hunt for a body when bystanders mistake it for a real corpse.

This confusion stands as an emblem for the entire novel, for strangers' reactions to the figure are a double mistake. From a distance, they assume the cotton bags stuffed with old tights, and the wig on top of a papier-mâché mask, belong to a human being. But even when they realise their error, they fail to recognise the figure as an effigy of Charlotte Brontë, the third member of the trio of mistresses at the heart of the novel.

Indeed it is Charlotte's passionate but unsent letters to her "dear master", the Belgian schoolmaster Monsieur Heger, which open and close the book. They provide a kind of frame for a story about desire, fantasies and women's longing, so often unfulfilled, to be recognised by the men they love. This is Charlotte as her alter ego, the madwoman in the attic, fantasising about a friendship with the novelist George Sand at her château at Nohant and suggesting she can achieve the recognition she craves only from a woman dressed as a man.

Throughout the novel, women protect men while damaging each other, as though silently acknowledging that is their destiny. Triangles abound, with Madame Heger secretly hating her rival Charlotte, and Catherine and Vinny estranged by their rivalry for Adam.

It is Charlotte who verbalises the impact of this experience and its relationship to writing: "Telling sanctioned lies, writing fiction, I could fly free of nice Charlotte the good daughter. I could write of rage and pain."

They are the novel's real subject, at a moment when they finally threaten to surface and reveal the existence of another triangle, in the shape of Catherine's secret erotic relationship with Robert many years before.

The love between Adam and Vinny, who has protected her sister by keeping that secret, is characterised as a moment of pre-lapsarian innocence before the serpent of forbidden desire creates rivalries that reverberate throughout their adult lives.

Written as a series of files, like fragments on a computer's hard disk, the novel requires an effort from the reader to put the story together. But it is presented with Roberts's customary gift for sumptuous description and eye for telling detail, whether turned on clothes – at one point, Catherine wears "her pink cardigan over the 1930s crêpe-de-Chine nightdress Vinny had given her last Christmas" – or food. Ostensibly about men's power over their wives and lovers, it also contains the subversive implication that they could learn a great deal from women – if only they paid more attention.

Joan Smith's latest book is 'Moralities' (Penguin)