I, Julian by Clare Gilbert - review by Alice Jolly

Alice Jolly

The Anchoress’s Tale

I, Julian

By

Hodder & Stoughton 336pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
 

Clare Gilbert’s I, Julian is a biographical novel telling the story of the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who was a mother, a mystic and a radical, as well as the first woman to write a book in English – Revelations of Divine Love, a description of the visions she experienced at the age of thirty, when she thought she was on her deathbed. As a woman in the medieval world, the real Julian did not feel able to write about herself directly, instead calling herself ‘the creature’. Gilbert creates an engaging first-person voice for her that feels both accessible and true to the period. 

The book begins with Julian as a young child so sensitive she is troubled even by the sight of ‘a flower broken at its stem by a thoughtless human hand’. When she loses her father to ‘a new, ugly, pitiless, mortal sickness’, she becomes obsessed with the belief that a vengeful God has punished her for her sins. Later, Julian loses her husband and child to the same plague and feels she is caught ‘in a binding circle of pain, pain demanded by God, pain received from God’. Eventually, she finds refuge in a community of laywomen who live, pray and study together, earning their keep as ‘parchmenters’.

As part of this community, Julian tends to ‘the poverty-stricken, beached survivors of the pestilence-wave’, while continuing to feel that God ‘remains aloof, angry with me’. When she herself becomes seriously ill, she has feverish visions that culminate in God speaking to her: ‘He did not say, you shall not

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

The Art of Darkness

Cambridge, Shakespeare

Follow Literary Review on Twitter