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.
Her parents named her after Anna Livia Plurabelle of Joyce
's Finnegans Wake, and after Julian of Norwich
, medieval anchoress and author of Revelations of Divine Love.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Features
Margaret Atwood
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted in Travelling In a host of quotations from old and new sources: from studies in Zen Buddhism
, the Tao te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, and Julian of Norwich
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
Many of these poems trace patterns in their author's life; others engage with Christian women of earlier times. MF
asks of Julian of Norwich
: Be with us still, who bear our cells so badly...
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...
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 comic, biting satire of the early chapters modulates into a thriller or adventure story as Vanessa pursues her dream of a safari among gorillas close to the dangerous Congo border. (Modern communications dominate this...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Kathleen Jamie
Julian of Norwich voices a sense of enclosure, frustration, praying in vain; but the final stanza (beginning And yet, and yet)
Jamie, Kathleen, and Lilias Fraser. Mr. and Mrs. Scotland are Dead. Bloodaxe Books.
50
is an image of light and fruition: I am suspended / in...
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...
Cultural formation
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
thought that the existential angst she suffered during her childhood was unique until she read Margaret Fuller
's Memoirs.
Kelty, Mary Ann. Reminiscences of Thought and Feeling. W. Pickering.
134
She felt her unhappiness as a child and young woman was good for...
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.