New Book, The Ram In The Thicket, imagines Julian's life in 1413
Late that autumn of 1413, looking back on her conversation with Caister the eve of Palm Sunday, Julian of Norwich would wonder how God hadn’t seen fit to bring Margery Kempe to her earlier. Sooner or later, a woman who’s seen Christ Jesus bleed before her eyes is going to attract a woman who needs everyone’s eyes fixed upon her in order to believe her own faith is real. All the more so if the first has kept a vow for thirty-five years to stay put in a room with an open window. In a sense, Julian had been waiting for Margery. Much as a duck on a clutch of eggs is waiting for an unscrupulous fowler.
Fifteen years in the making, David Townsend, a retired professor of medieval literature at the University of Toronto is publishing a book that imagines her life at the time she met Margery Kempe. David writes,
"Not one but at least two other novels that springboard from Julian's encounter with Margery [have] appeared [recently]. Both interesting. Neither of them anything like the book I'd set out to write.
"My Julian is a very different character from theirs. She's not a romanticized figure of otherwordly piety. She struggles to maintain empathy with Margery. She's capable of irritation, and she sometimes locks horns with her confessor over how she lives her life. She's got a grainy, ironic streak, in response to the often unbearable contradictions of a disastrously flawed world created by a loving God."