A review of In search of Julian of Norwich by Sheila Upton. Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd (London 2019). Pbk. 94 pages. £8.95.
Many readers will first have encountered Julian of Norwich through the famous lines which precede the closure of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘And all shall be well and/ All manner of things shall be well’. Sheila Upjohn’s book takes the form of a spiritual detective story, engagingly illustrated and designed to uncover the identity, significance and long obscurity of Julian, how the famous lines relate to the rest of her mystical writings, and why she has become an inspiration.
Upjohn has promoted Julian’s text through many editions of translation and selections for daily and Lenten readings. The author of Revelations of Divine Love, is intangible, without relics, or known grave. Her existence is documented, fortuitously, by another woman born in 1373, the first writer of English autobiography, Marjorie Kemp, who gives an account of several days of ‘holy conversation’ held with the anchorite, ‘talking of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ’.
Outside of this source, little can be known of Julian. As Upjohn acknowledges, her book is a story ‘where everything is speculation and there is no real answer in the final chapter’. The text itself survives only through a manuscript presumed to have been taken to Paris by a fugitive religious. The first edition was printed in 1670 and in 1901 Grace Warrack edited a version for Methuen which has never since been out of print. Julian herself was clearly an anchorite but not necessarily a nun. Indeed, Upjohn tentatively decides she was more likely to have been a householder and a mother. Certainly contemporary advice for an anchoress suggests a way of life that is far from the popular idea of enclosure. The Ancrene Riwle is full of homely advice on the needs of an anchorite, including suitably warm clothing and even pets: ‘My dear sisters, you should keep no beast except a cat’. It specifies a cell should have three windows, facing church, domestic support services and visitors seeking spiritual advice, the latter being not so much a distracting window on the world but a way of meeting God ‘in your neighbour’s troubles’.
It is unclear how educated Julian may have been. She described herself as ‘unlettered’ but may just be referring to her lack of Latin or rhetorical skills. She is clearly aware that she needs to justify herself as a woman writer and her style is vivid but highly repetitive. Upjohn includes sizable selections of text in her own translation but discusses the merits of translating differently, in ‘sense-lines’, as in the text by Fr. John-Julian OJN which, she demonstrates, makes the words ‘shine out’. Or else, one might say, the text is essentially poetic and works best laid out as verse.
Julian’s theology can be summed up in the ideas of love and relationship. God’s substance and our own is no different, since Jesus entered our nature and all is God. Far from the male club of the Trinity, Jesus is our ‘true mother’ who hungered to embrace Jerusalem as a mother bird gathers her brood. Prayer is a conversation with God who wants to make us a partner in good deeds and by prayer we are attuned to God and make God happy and glad. How, says Julian, can we help but be restless when we look to little things that have no rest in them? Only in God, all wise and good, is true rest. This is the source of the reassurance that all will be well.
Upjohn’s approach is as homely and accessible as her subject, though this may not appeal to everyone. Her detective work is unashamedly unscientific in the usual sense, since it focuses on something which cannot be tested or measured: love. Mysticism, by definition, embodies the unproven and reaches beyond language itself. Upjohn concludes her investigation with a consideration of the proliferation of Julian groups which meet for contemplation and silent prayer. As she says, it often seems that every day brings more torrents of words:
In the beginning was the Word, but we have over-produced and trivialised words to such an extent that, in order to find the Word at the heart of the universe, we have to take the way of silence.
Kathryn Southworth is a former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlet, A Pure Bead, a sequence on Virginia Woolf (Paekakariki Press, London 2021).