For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

Product Information

I wrote about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in my dissertation so the premise of this sounded super interesting. In the early sections, I struggled to tell Julian and Margery’s voices apart, but as the novel unfolds, Mackenzie establishes their distinctive characters and their very different attitudes to their holy visions. He has written poetry for members of the British peerage, scripts for BBC Radio, and has created and produced several board games, including Tatakai - a game of covert warfare. She went around the town having “conversations” about what Jesus said to her, which, strictly speaking, was not preaching.

If you’re new to these figures, you might be captivated by their bizarre life stories and religious obsession, but I thought the bare telling was somewhat lacking in literary interest. MacKenzie alternates the stories of these very different women, telling them through their own voices in striking, simple but often beautiful language. She was a bold and passionate woman, and the accusations of heresy were no doubt motivated by a wish to see her humiliated for claiming spiritual authority. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty - three years.

Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. This 160-page novel tells the story of two medieval women who existed at the same time, both of whom wrote two valuable texts that were almost lost to time — one of which was the first known book written in English by a woman. The invisible balancing and weighing MacKenzie has done across the whole to bring them dialogue with each other and to bring the reader into emotional and spiritual connectedness with them is just so brilliant.

Can it be that Julian, far more mentally stable, who married for love and felt real sorrow at the death of her husband and only baby, counselled her visitor in language and imagery that fitted with her world? Meanwhile, a grieving Julian abandons her secular life to occupy a small cell attached to a church in Norwich. Settyth al yowr trust in God and feryth not the langage of the world, for the mor despyte, schame, and repref that ye have in the world the mor is yowr meryte in the sygth of God. The painting is of the ‘shewings’ or revelatory visions experienced by the mystic Julian of Norwich.My first novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. 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 a good insight into religion at the time. I found the structure and pacing very unbalanced, with the first section, telling the two separate tales in parallel, being by far the longest and the actual meeting at Julian’s cell being dealt with in just a few pages near the end.

Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Her visions of Christ have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Following His command, she revealed the grace that God had infused into her soul, including compunction, contrition, sweetness, and devotion, along with compassion through holy meditation and high contemplation. I had wanted to prolong each moment of my life, to get closer to experiencing time as God experiences it: not the instantly dissolving moment, but something larger and more encompassing. Some of the most extraordinary passages in the novel describe Julian’s surrender to the limits of her cell, the infinite-external giving way to the infinite-internal. Julian, an anchoress, has not left the cell in Norwich to which she has been confined for twenty-three years.

It is in this fifteenth-century Norfolk, ruled by a universal, all-powerful Church, yet where few of the folk really believe in it all, that Marjory Kempe and the woman who later became known as Julian of Norwich were born.

The two women have stories to tell one another, including revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear.