We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. In Gilbert’s account, Julian was just a child when she watched her father, a Norwich wool merchant, die in agony from the plague, and when her visions begin she assumes she too is dying of the pestilence – as her husband and daughter have done.

I can’t enumerate all 16 here, but Revelation 14, on the subject of sin and prayer, is of particular importance. Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich - the mother, mystic and radical. Yet first through her visions, then through her later years of contemplation she gains a deep and abiding sense of God's love. Julian’s manuscripts are protected by trusted sisters and are passed from hand to hand, become the first book to be written by a woman in English. Hold on tight: the intense first-person narrative is quite hard to read, with many strange formulations of language, but… it is worth it to persevere.Written with profound insight, spiritual and psychological, and a rare sensitivity to the everyday world of the fourteenth century, it is a brilliantly illuminating companion to one of the greatest works of spiritual writing in English. Even more remarkably, she has plausibly drawn the inner prayer-life, the self-doubt, the loneliness and the quiet faith of this great genius. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Claire Gilbert inhabits Julian of Norwich in the way that Hilary Mantel immersed herself in Cromwell.

Everything has dissolved, even the little word, and there is only God beholding in me and I am no one and no where. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. From the author of Miles to Go before I Sleep comes I, Julian, the account of a medieval woman who dares to tell her own story, battling grief, plague, the church and societal expectations to do so. As the subtitle makes clear, this is a fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich - someone I knew of, mostly from her most famous quotation (at least to me!Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. It is mostly fiction as so little is actually known about Julian but it has been written with great sensitivity and is very believable. What seems indisputable is that Julian was the author of the first work written in English by a woman. Julian joins a lay company of devout women, happy, frankly, no longer to have to bear the burden of a “household”.

Told in the first person, this is the fictionalised autobiography of Julian of Norwich, a young woman who became an anchorite in the fourteenth century.Seeds germinate, sap rises, birdsong erupts, spirit lifts and expands and loves all that is made: it is so very good. using no words save perhaps one word, and with that little word gently repeating my soul quietens and softens and the little word enters me and brings me to deep, deep rest in my soul, which becomes no place. Around 20 years later, Julian, by now a solitary contemplative living in physical isolation (an “anchorite”), wrote the ‘long version’ of the Revelations herself.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. And from a few pages later (p170): “The church is grey stone, its stubby tower built toward heaven, not with the elegance of a spire but with a stable determined intent, open to heaven rather than pointing at it.For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Words failed as Love itself was set free in the encounter, melted from the ice that kept it prisoner. Sin is behovely (inevitable in context, perhaps beneficial to someone) and carries no fault (it is simply bad, like a trip or a fall). I, Julian is a fictionalised autobiography of Dame (or Mother) Julian of Norwich, best described, I would say, as a contemplative lay religious figure – a lay nun, really.