I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

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Frankly, I bought it because it seemed like it might present some good 14th-century social history – and because of the quite beautiful dust-jacket on the first-edition hardcover (to the publishers: yes, your eye-catching designs do work).

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. Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich – the mother, mystic and radical.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. It carries a universal message, a system of belief and of living, that is based on the premise of a loving God, and that is in essence optimistic. Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich - the mother, mystic and radical. As a mystic, her interpretation of the visions she experiences lead her to the famous conclusion that “All will be Well.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Sin is behovely (inevitable in context, perhaps beneficial to someone) and carries no fault (it is simply bad, like a trip or a fall). It meant I knew the text really well; I was secure in my understanding that there was an ecological dimension and that her method is porosity.Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.

Words failed as Love itself was set free in the encounter, melted from the ice that kept it prisoner. Gilbert uses her own experience of cancer – in particular the dreadful constipation she endured as a result of the anti-sickness medication she was prescribed – to evoke Julian’s ordeal of bodily pain. Very little that is solid fact is known about her life, but of her existence and writings there is no doubt. This book is going to introduce many new readers to Julian and inspire others who know her slightly to go back with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated sense of how her writing developed and in what sort of historical setting.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! More than that, it details Julian's struggle to answer the fundamental question: if a loving God exists (and is omnipotent), why is the world full of suffering? It is mostly fiction as so little is actually known about Julian but it has been written with great sensitivity and is very believable.