I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

£9.495
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I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

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£9.495 FREE Shipping

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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 is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world’s most important women. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women. There are also vivid descriptions of the multiple miscarriages – ‘13 graves in my heart’ – suffered by Julian’s friend, Isabel.

The fictional autobiography I, Julian, published with unexpectedly appropriate timing at the 650th anniversary of Julian’s May 1373 visions, is the result. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women . 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. 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. Come to encounters with people and places and nature and God and pain and suffering with an open heart and a welcoming smile and a willingness to learn.Immediately following her visions, Julian related the experience to her confessor priest, Thomas, who wrote down what might be thought of as the ‘short version’ of the revelations.

It is a beautiful, intensely moving achievement which not only excites literary admiration: it renews the reader's faith that 'all shall be well'. Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. 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 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. 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.However, I found the accounts of her visions and the theological discussions less interesting and found myself skipping through some of them. 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. 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.

Everything has dissolved, even the little word, and there is only God beholding in me and I am no one and no where.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. I have never felt so alive,’ Julian says at her ‘funeral’, when she enters the walled cell which she will inhabit for decades. 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.

Julian is sympathetic with them, and with the Lollards and Wycliffites – who are something of a precursor to Protestantism and the Reformation. 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?

Words failed as Love itself was set free in the encounter, melted from the ice that kept it prisoner. 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. In writing Revelations of Divine Love, Dame Julian became the first known female author in the English language. Throughout her book, Ms Gilbert uses the device of Thomas as Julian’s interlocutor; much of the tale is related by Julian in ‘conversation’ with him.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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