I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

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I loved the story telling, from when Julian was a young girl watching her father die from the plague through to her voluntarily being walled up in her cell and how she dealt with that. I, Julian is beautifully written, capturing the voice of a woman we can only really know through very brief historical records and her own centuries old words with a clarity that is compelling.

It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women .

Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. Julian's life is touched by loss, through pestilence, death and her own decision to live as an anchorite, locked into a cell attached to a church for decades. However, I found the accounts of her visions and the theological discussions less interesting and found myself skipping through some of them.

There are also vivid descriptions of the multiple miscarriages – ‘13 graves in my heart’ – suffered by Julian’s friend, Isabel. 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. Julian joins a lay company of devout women, happy, frankly, no longer to have to bear the burden of a “household”. 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. I can’t enumerate all 16 here, but Revelation 14, on the subject of sin and prayer, is of particular importance.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. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. 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.