I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich

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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. 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. It is mostly fiction as so little is actually known about Julian but it has been written with great sensitivity and is very believable. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women .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. Their questions were not answered, nothing was resolved, life flowed on with its doubts and distresses, but I [Julian’s final confessor, Hugh] never saw a visitor leave without a lighter step and a steadier gaze directed to God.

I have never felt so alive,’ Julian says at her ‘funeral’, when she enters the walled cell which she will inhabit for decades. 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.

There are also vivid descriptions of the multiple miscarriages – ‘13 graves in my heart’ – suffered by Julian’s friend, Isabel. In writing Revelations of Divine Love, Dame Julian became the first known female author in the English language. The young Julian of Norwich encounters the strangeness of death: first her father, then later her husband and her child. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well', but knew very little about. But in the midst of suspicion and menace, when the Church is actively condemning heretics, Julian is not safe.