Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Julian of Norwich
-
Standard Name: Julian of Norwich
Self-constructed Name: Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich
was a religious visionary whose experiences of the divine came to her in the later fourteenth century. She was also something that no Englishwoman had been before her: the author of a treatise offering spiritual guidance to others which achieved wide currency.
Riddy, Felicity. “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization”. Editing Women, edited by Ann M. Hutchison, University of Toronto Press, pp. 101-24.
This genre seems almost impossible in the late twentieth century, but the authors believe that saints today are potentially spiritual resources whose presences through the traces they have left behind in the minds of the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Monica Furlong
MF
images these women, active between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, as a wave, slow and tentative at first, rising to a crescendo with Julian of Norwich
, the one who speaks most clearly...
EL
also wrote two one-act morality plays: her Christmas Morality Play was published by E. Mathews
in 1908, and Dame Julian
's Window was produced by the Morality Play Society
at London's Little Theatre
on...
Textual Production
Dorothy Richardson
In her correspondence Richardson addresses a great range of topics, including her own varied reading. She comments on women writers from Julian of Norwich
through Jane Austen
, Emily
and Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
Textual Production
Monica Furlong
The second was The Wisdom of Julian of Norwich, a compilation from Julian
's Revelations of Divine Love (written from February 1393). This appeared in a series, Visionary Women, of which MF
was general editor.
The story focuses on three women: Toby (who loses her loving, low-ranking parents to the system, survives sexual violence, and becomes a not wholly believing member of a sect of ecologists or nature-worshippers calling themselves...
Textual Features
Jane Lead
She said she wrote for all Ranks, Orders, and Degrees of Persons, from the highest to the lowest.
Lead, Jane. A Fountain of Gardens. Printed and are to be sold by the book-sellers of London and Westminster.
3: 1, A2r
Her language is direct, but visually and imaginatively vivid, marked with the rhythms of...
Textual Features
Winefrid Thimelby
Latz also finds her style to be poetic, reflecting the influence of mystics like St Augustine
and Ruysbroeck
(whose work was later translated and discussed by Evelyn Underhill
); Thimelby quotes and cites these two...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Hincks
EH
's short introductory poem, The Widows Suite, seeking approval from a friend named T. S., exemplifies her somewhat tortured inversions of natural word-order: Moreover I not willing am / that Truth at all...
Textual Features
Catherine Holland
Dorothy L. Latz
notes that CH
reflects no influence of the Jansenism
which was current during her lifetime. Her theology stresses the incarnational, the divine immanence within human nature.
Latz, Dorothy L., editor. “Neglected Writings by Recusant Women”. Neglected English Literature: Recusant Writings of the 16th-17th Centuries, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg.
26
This, whether she knew it...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jennings
Every Changing Shape was reprinted in 1996 by Carcanet Press
with a foreword by Michael Schmidt
. It collects essays on Christian writers and mystics that address the way that faith informs the creative imagination...
Reception
Lady Lucy Herbert
Dorothy L Latz
, observing how LLH
attributes maternal love to God (he is not content to call himself and to be our Father, but because a Mother's love is more tender, he compares...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ferrar
The hold exerted on T. S. Eliot
's imagination by Little Gidding seems to have been produced by the idea of the community, not by their texts. His poem Little Gidding gives little hint that...
Timeline
After 18 March 1954: English-educated, American historical or...
Writing climate item
After 18 March 1954
English-educated, American historical or biographicalnovelist Anya Seton
issued her best-known work, Katherine, about the commoner from whom descends every English monarch since Henry VII
.
18 June 2006: Katharine Jefferts Schori, Bishop of Nevada,...
Building item
18 June 2006
Katharine Jefferts Schori
, Bishop of Nevada, became arguably . . . the highest-ranking woman in Episcopal
history when she was chosen presiding bishop of the Episcopal church in America.
Texts
Julian of Norwich,. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. Editors Colledge, Edmund and James Walsh, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978.
Julian of Norwich,. “Introduction”. A Book of Showings, edited by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978, pp. 1-198.
Julian of Norwich,. “Introduction”. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, edited by Frances Beer, Carl Winter, 1978, pp. 7-37.
Julian of Norwich,. Revelations of Divine Love. R. F. S. Cressy, 1670.
Julian of Norwich, and Henry Collins. Revelations of Divine Love. T. Richardson, 1877.