You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. And the person speaking would after a time fall into silence, and she would hold their gaze with her loving look, and the love would reflect in their faces as sweet lightness. Yet first through her visions, then through her later years of contemplation she gains a deep and abiding sense of God's love.

It carries a universal message, a system of belief and of living, that is based on the premise of a loving God, and that is in essence optimistic. It demands careful reading and is hard going in places – especially Chapters 21 to 27, the account of Julian’s “revelations” or “showings” – her visions of God – seen over two days during an illness she suffered in the year 1373. Come to encounters with people and places and nature and God and pain and suffering with an open heart and a welcoming smile and a willingness to learn.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 . 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. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world’s most important women. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.

Julian joins a lay company of devout women, happy, frankly, no longer to have to bear the burden of a “household”.

The sharp green new leaves of the birches shimmering in the light, the intoxicating smell of the may, its frothy blossom bud-bursting on the blackthorn, the new ferns unfolding, the springy grass under the horses’ hoofs, this twisted tree trunk and the ivy that clings to it, the rich fresh green that is emerging everywhere. Throughout her book, Ms Gilbert uses the device of Thomas as Julian’s interlocutor; much of the tale is related by Julian in ‘conversation’ with him. But in the midst of suspicion and menace, when the Church is actively condemning heretics, Julian is not safe. More than that, it details Julian's struggle to answer the fundamental question: if a loving God exists (and is omnipotent), why is the world full of suffering?

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.Julian’s manuscripts are protected by trusted sisters and are passed from hand to hand, become the first book to be written by a woman in English. Julian's manuscripts are protected by trusted sisters and are passed from hand to hand, become the first book to be written by a woman in English. 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. Sin is behovely (inevitable in context, perhaps beneficial to someone) and carries no fault (it is simply bad, like a trip or a fall). Julian's voice rings out true on every page and a deep understanding of her world and her work underpins each line.

And from a few pages later (p170): “The church is grey stone, its stubby tower built toward heaven, not with the elegance of a spire but with a stable determined intent, open to heaven rather than pointing at it. This book is going to introduce many new readers to Julian and inspire others who know her slightly to go back with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated sense of how her writing developed and in what sort of historical setting.It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women. As a mystic, her interpretation of the visions she experiences lead her to the famous conclusion that “All will be Well. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women .