One bookcase on the first floor is devoted to foreign editions of her novels, but so are a series of boxes off the kitchen that contain the ever-arriving overflow from the 30 languages in which she is now published. Her first book, the novel “Housekeeping,” about two sisters surviving a childhood of serial abandonments, was published in 1980 and brought her fame among writers. But she did not have a large readership until a quarter-century later, following the publication of her second novel, “Gilead,” a septuagenarian pastor’s letter to his young son. That book earned her a Pulitzer Prize and a kind of mythic status. I have heard novelists describe Robinson’s “return” as if she had risen from the dead. Yet she was neither inactive during those intervening years nor working fruitlessly on the second novel; she writes and only has written her novels quickly — about 18 months per book. Rather, during her hiatus from fiction, Robinson published an incendiary indictment of British nuclear and environmental policy (“Mother Country”); worked on the dozen essays that make up “The Death of Adam,” a book that a reader with no grounding in theology or the history of ideas could emerge from conversant in these fields; and taught four classes per academic year, all while continuing her own education in theology, which she describes as an endless pursuit.

“Lila,” Robinson’s fourth novel and third set in mythical Gilead, will be published this month. Lila has appeared as a character in the two previous Gilead novels. In “Gilead,” she takes form only through John Ames’s attempts to express what he can about who he was to a son who will never know him when he grows up. “Home,” the novel that followed, takes place over the same time period as Ames’s novel, but in it, Robinson has switched to the third person, writing mostly from the point of view of a woman, Glory, the daughter of Ames’s closest friend, the Rev. Robert Boughton. Through the very different complexities of that reverend’s family, readers see Ames come and go with Lila; her speaking voice can be heard at length, but at an inevitable remove. In “Lila,” her story is now told from the inside. The novel confirms many things, not least of which is how Robinson’s work is unified by her belief in a sacred world whose wonders we have difficulty opening ourselves to, both privately and publicly.

“Being and human beings,” Robinson told me, “are invested with a degree of value that we can’t honor appropriately. An overabundance that is magical.” Honoring that overabundance has taken many forms in Robinson’s writing. Each of her novels, though formally unique, is focused on the movements of a single consciousness; most of her essays, despite their intellectual reach, are devoted to a single historical figure. The essays often express unvarnished frustration over how inaccurately we remember the writers and thinkers she admires most — theologians like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards — reframing what we thought was important about them. “It’s interesting that people systematically misrepresent these pillars,” Robinson said, with astonishment. Calvin is not, as we are taught, a cold creature who claimed we were born preordained to heaven or hell. “Calvin has a strange reputation that is based very solidly on the fact that nobody reads him,” Robinson has said. “I was, and continue to be, struck by the power of the metaphysics and the visionary quality of his theology. . . . [H]e’s terrifically admiring of what the human mind does.”

What the human mind does is, as it happens, what Robinson is most interested in and most galled to see unappreciated or gotten wrong. Her current project is devoted to Christological essays, essays that reconsider Jesus, just as in earlier work she has reconsidered Moses. “If you could create a phenomenology of consciousness, some part of it would be the systematic falsification of the foundations of our culture,” she said. “We remember Moses saying, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ But he also said, ‘Love the stranger as thyself.’ This is not unimportant. And so I feel the humanity of Moses. Like John Ames. He’s a character I put together in my mind, sure. But when people do things that are honorable and fine, it is terrible to see them slandered. And it doesn’t matter if they did them 3,000 years ago, you know?”

If Robinson’s nonfiction has been remarkable in its ability to make the polemical seem reasonable, her fiction has been remarkable for how it embodies her intellectual fascinations without turning her novels into pedagogical platforms. All four of the novels are in conversation with — at times tacitly, at times explicitly — the stories of the Bible. “Housekeeping” is the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucile, who, after their mother commits suicide, are abandoned to the care of their grandmother and, after she dies, are abandoned to the care of their grandmother’s two maiden sisters-in-law. They, in turn, overwhelmed by the burden of caring for children, abandon the girls to the care of the girls’ aunt. And she, the girls come to understand, is not a stable person herself. Without question, the novel is preoccupied with the generational, genealogical succession of suffering. But it also makes sustained allusions to the book of Genesis, particularly the flood narrative: God’s failed attempt to wipe the world clean of the very errors he could not eradicate from creation — his creations.