Initially, Julian only had her “shewings”; once she became an anchoress she worked and reworked her understanding of them. The book does provide a good insight into how female mystics were treated – reviled, rather than revered as their male counterparts were – and it also provides information about religion at the time. While Julian has reached the end of her life by the close of this short novel, Margery still has ahead of her pilgrimages around the world. We can see how her ostentatious holiness serves her in a patriarchal society, allowing her to do otherwise forbidden things like neglecting her children and refusing to have sex with her husband.

My second novel, about the Victorian art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. But nowadays, we would doubtless question her mental health – likewise for Julian when you learn that her shewings arose from a time of fevered hallucination.What creatur that hath thes tokenys he muste stedfastlych belevyn that the Holy Gost dwellyth in hys sowle. Margery, in contrast, doesn’t lock herself away, but remains in the secular world, a wife and mother of fourteen. MacKenzie ends with an epilogue which tells us that The Book of Margery Kempe was found entirely by accident, falling out of a cupboard in 1934 when someone was looking for a ping pong ball, while Revelations of Divine Love was kept hidden by a succession of women for centuries. Despite being a novella, the book dragged on and was effectively little more than a description of the hardships the two women had faced. I’ve also been a guest on Radio Four’s Front Row, discussing my novel with Shahidha Bari, and on Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme, together with Dr Hetta Howes and Dr Claire Gilbert, discussing Julian of Norwich and the 650th anniversary of her book, Revelations of Divine Love.

It was immuration, in a room ten by six by eight by six paces in size, where she had died to the world. At its best, historical fiction can open up a window on the past, breathing life into those who are long gone while reminding us of how different their world is from our own. MacKenzie engages with them on their own terms, as two women trying to resolve the conflict between authority and experience. Interestingly, these women did meet in real life, and the latter part of the book deftly imagines their conversation. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear.In "Abbi pietà del mio piccolo dolore", Victoria MacKenzie dà spazio a entrambi gli aspetti -quello cristiano e quello umano- di due donne che vissero nell'Inghilterra quattrocentesca: Margery Kempe e Julian di Norwich. That said, there have been recent developments particularly around two figures: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Many were the holy dialogues shared between the anchorite and the woman through their communion in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ during the days they spent together.

The two lives eventually crash into each other in a sustained and beautiful dialogue that contains one electrifying moment of connection. Ho letto le prime 50 pagine tutte d’un fiato, mi sono detta:”oh, finalmente sono incappata in un buon romanzo” e niente, non è stato così.

There are already many good reviews of this book online, but I would nevertheless love to draw your attention to this novel. Her withdrawal had been prompted by a series of religious visions when she was afflicted by a fever aged thirty about which she remains silent. It can introduce us to people and places we've never met before, if dealing with little-known events from the past, or give us some new way of seeing a famous figure or momentous occurrence.

Mackenzie beautifully handles Julian’s early difficulties in her isolation, and also the reasons why she chooses it.Margery is entirely different, beset by visions of Christ which are both visceral and sensuous, unable to remain silent despite the regular burning of heretics. There is no tradition in these isles of veneration similar to the way that Bernini sculpted St Teresa of Avila, or the acclaim given to the “little way” of St Thérèse of Lisieux (whose influence apparently cured the infant blindness of Edith Piaf), or the esteem in which the music of Hildegard of Bingen in now held, even if her “visionary” philosophy in now little read. Butler-Bowdon threatened to throw it on the bonfire, saying “then we may be able to find ping pong balls and bats when we want them”.