I really felt that I got to know her especially in the early days when she struggled to cope with being imprisoned in one small room. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. 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.

The 14th revelation of the parable of the Lord and Servant is the most intriguing and I think its reinterpretation of the Fall is completely brilliant.Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich - the mother, mystic and radical. However, I found the accounts of her visions and the theological discussions less interesting and found myself skipping through some of them. As time passes, she must overcome the departure and passing of her ‘minders’: those who love her, including her maid Alice, her confessor Thomas, and her benefactor the Countess of Sussex. 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.

It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world’s most important women. Battling grief, plague, the church and societal expectations, and compelled by her powerful visions, Julian finds a way to live a life of freedom - as an anchoress, bricked up in a small room on the side of a church. As a mystic, her interpretation of the visions she experiences lead her to the famous conclusion that “All will be Well.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This rather wonderful fictional autobiography was published to coincide with the 650th anniversary of Julian first experiencing, in May 1373, the series of 16 visions she wrote about in Revelations of Divine Love.