To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. We see Julian’s early life from 1347: childhood, the great Plague, death of her father, her marriage, recurrence of plague, death of Julian’s husband and daughter, and her rejection of the prospect of remarriage. 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. As a mystic, her interpretation of the visions she experiences lead her to the famous conclusion that “All will be Well.

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.Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich - the mother, mystic and radical. Claire Gilbert inhabits Julian of Norwich in the way that Hilary Mantel immersed herself in Cromwell. 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. But in the midst of suspicion and menace, when the Church is actively condemning heretics, Julian is not safe. Even more remarkably, she has plausibly drawn the inner prayer-life, the self-doubt, the loneliness and the quiet faith of this great genius.

Seeds germinate, sap rises, birdsong erupts, spirit lifts and expands and loves all that is made: it is so very good. Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. However, I found the accounts of her visions and the theological discussions less interesting and found myself skipping through some of them. 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.I, Julian is beautifully written, capturing the voice of a woman we can only really know through very brief historical records and her own centuries old words with a clarity that is compelling. The Timeline at the end is a fascinating and bittersweet summary of the life and times of Dame Julian of Norwich. 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. Written with profound insight, spiritual and psychological, and a rare sensitivity to the everyday world of the fourteenth century, it is a brilliantly illuminating companion to one of the greatest works of spiritual writing in English.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well', but knew very little about. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. It meant I knew the text really well; I was secure in my understanding that there was an ecological dimension and that her method is porosity.