5 Julian of Norwich It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
T
he first book published in the modern English language, Revelations of Divine Love, was written by a woman, an English abbess: Julian of Norwich; in it, Jesus famously tells her that, although there must be sin in the world, in the end all will be well if we simply trust Him. Like some of her predecessors and successors, Julian transgressively insisted that being a woman was no bar to writing about the love of God. ‘But for I am a woman should I therefore live that I should not tell you the goodness of God?’
J
ulian had a near death experience – ‘And when I was thirty years old and a half, God sent me a bodily sickness, in which I lay three days and three nights; and 31
