In 1413, two of the most important women in the history of literature met. They were the anchoress (or religious hermit) Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography is the first ever to have been written in English by man or woman. Their encounter, in Norwich at the cell in which Julian had by then been willingly incarcerated for more than 20 years, provides the climax to Victoria MacKenzie’s transfixing debut novel.
As alternating first-person accounts of their lives reveal, they could scarcely be more different. Kempe is a mayor’s daughter, fashion-conscious and often comically unfiltered. Having wed a man entirely lacking in business sense and borne 14 children, she’s also exhausted. When Christ first appears before her he is the “handsomest” man she’s ever seen; their subsequent encounters are intimate, physical – carnal, even.
“Her voice swanned and preened and boasted,” the anchoress will observe of her visitor. “Yet there was another note to her song. Margery Kempe was the loneliest woman I had ever met.”
About Julian considerably less is known, allowing MacKenzie to imagine for her a beloved husband and baby daughter, both lost to the plague. When she herself falls ill with a fever, she experiences 16 “shewings”, or visions, and is persuaded to retreat from the world.
Her early days as an anchoress are excruciating – far from being the spiritual sanctuary she had craved, her cell is simply an earth-floored shack, crawling with woodlice and earwigs, noisy with her own “racing thoughts and yearnings and memories and foolishness”.
What these women share is bravery: in telling their stories at a time when the church has weaponised misogyny – Julian in writing, unlettered Margery by engaging passersby on the street – both are risking their lives. As for their spirituality, without detracting from its ardent mystery, MacKenzie lightly suggests connections to postnatal depression, grief and the urge to self-harm.
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. Any nagging sense of incompleteness is entirely apt, however. That these two women’s experiences have been preserved is a miracle, and in animating them with such vibrancy, MacKenzie gestures also to the multitudinous others that have gone unrecorded.
• For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
