It is mostly fiction as so little is actually known about Julian but it has been written with great sensitivity and is very believable. 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. And the person speaking would after a time fall into silence, and she would hold their gaze with her loving look, and the love would reflect in their faces as sweet lightness. Everything has dissolved, even the little word, and there is only God beholding in me and I am no one and no where. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

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. The cell has windows – one on to the outside world, at which people could seek her counsel, another into the adjacent church – and her daily needs are attended to by her maid Alice. The young Julian of Norwich encounters the strangeness of death: first her father, then later her husband and her child. 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. 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 tale culminates in Julian succeeding in completion of her chapters on the 14th Revelation: the Lord and the Servant – the latter not sinning by intent, but rushing to obey and accidentally falling; pain is love – God is always merciful if He (or, perhaps, She) receives prayers.

We see Julian’s early life from 1347: childhood, the great Plague, death of her father, her marriage, recurrence of plague, death of Julian’s husband and daughter, and her rejection of the prospect of remarriage. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Very little that is solid fact is known about her life, but of her existence and writings there is no doubt. 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. 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.