I love being given the opportunity to update our school library which is a unique space for both senior students and staff to access high quality literature. This is definitely a must-buy. It kept me absolutely gripped from cover to cover and is exactly the kind of read that just flies off the shelves. It has exactly the right combination of credible characters and a compelling plot thatI just could not put down. This is a great read that I couldn't stop thinking about and it made for a hugely satisfying read. I'm definitely going to order a copy and think it will immediately become a popular addition to our fiction shelves. 10/10 would absolutely recommend.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie. I’m already a huge fan of Julian who lives in the box. The story follows Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich who are both cool as fuck and how they ended up causing chaos in the 1300’s. This books spilts between the two of them and paints their lives as tough in their pursuit of God. I personally think it’s pretty accurate in portraying them as not always happy, devoted people but struggling with their life choices. I think the author has done a great job and the research she has put in is clear to see. My take away from this is god is good innit.

Absolutely loved this book, and have given it as a gift to several friends since its publication. Apologies for being so late to send review.

I've seen lots of very positive reviews of this novel, but unfortunately I found I just couldn't get into it and didn't finish reading it. Just not for me I guess.

Julian of Norwich once had a husband and a child but the plague took them and she has dedicated her life to prayer and contemplation. Living as an anchoress, walled up in a church, she has not touched another for twenty-three years. Margery Kempe is the mother of over a dozen children, a woman of substance from Bishop's Lynn. However when she starts telling others of her visions, she is called a heretic. In 1413 these two women meet...
This is a slim volume but is beautifully formed. The separate tales of the two women are brought together in the meeting and it feels like a meeting of two minds. The writing is spare but tells the tale of each woman and the travails they have faced in order to demonstrate their faith.

What an unusual read.
The story of Margery an ordinary thirteenth century housewife and Julian an anchoress. Both women have visions and revelations from God.
Margery is mostly misunderstood and slandered but she does have some supporters who assist her. She gets married and had fourteen children. She spends a lot of time weeping and telling people of her visions, she has a difficult life, offer questioned and slandered.
Julian is also a Godly person, but falls in love and married later giving birth to a daughter, she loses her family of a plague. Julian is uncertain what to do with her life after her Mother dies, so puts herself forward to be an anchoreess in Norwich, only realising the loneliness and deprivation once she is incarcerated.
The women eventually meet up as Julian nears the end of her life, she gives her book to Margery for safe keeping., Margery later dictates an account of her life.
Thank you Victoria and NetGalley.

The words of two medieval women speak to us over the centuries. The story intertwines the lives of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, both inspired by visions of God.
Both came from the merchant class and had sufficient time and means to be able to think of something beyond the struggle to survive. Since little autobiographical detail is known of either, the novella extrapolates from their writings and stories the substance of their lives. Julian is portrayed as having a quieter and more accepting character. A contented wife and mother, the plague destroys her family and eventually she withdraws from daily life to become an anchoress. Margery is also a wife and mother but with more reluctance – the fact that she had 14 children may have led to this dissatisfaction. She was also led by her visions to talk about them in the street, weep copiously and wear white like a virgin. All of which led her into conflict with her family, neighbours and the authorities.
When reading the book, Julian is the more sympathetic character but when Margery visits Julian their shared visions form a connection.
This is a short book (I would have liked it to be longer) and uses a lot of the women’s own words but placing the two of them together sheds more light on both their lives.


I had a copy of this book early through Netgalley

There's a lot of books about historical witches and their persecution, there's not a lot of fiction books about mystics even if their life wasn't alwasy easy and they were often persecuted.
Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich lived in the same time, they were both mystycs but their life is very different.
Julian, the anchoress who wrote a very important book like Revelations of Divine Love that is very different from the average Middle Age theology. An anchoress who lived in a small cell with a cat and a woman to help her
Margery the mother of 14 children, the histrionic preacher who was arrested and tried by the Inquisition more than once an travelled to Jerusalem and all over Europe. A women who wrote the first autobiography in English
This book is about them and I found it riveting and poignant. The voices of these women sound "real", similar to their voice in their books.
It's not a long book but it's one that cause book-hangover as I wanted more, I didn't want to say good bye to these women and their incredible spiritual life.
Two women who were able to chose a different life, women with a rich spiritual life and that strange gift call mystycism that mae them able to see what other couldn't see.
It's an excellent debut and I strongly recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

This is a well written book with an interesting premise but unfortunately I just did not feel motivated to pick this up, despite it's short size and I struggle to tell you why because on paper this is exactly my kind of book.

I am giving this 3 stars but would never-the-less wholeheartedly recommend anyone interested in this time-period or in feminist history read this because I can foresee many people loving it.

What a beautiful novella.
Medieval women have been popular in fiction the past few years, but none have touched me as much as the characters in this book, Margery and Julian, both based on historical women. And this is exactly the way I like to see historical fiction: highly researched, historically accurate, not making things more spectacular or gory or fantastical than they were.
There is so much that separates me from these women, not only time but also circumstance and religion, and yet, their thoughts seemed so relatable. A very impressive debut.

This debut novella is told in short fragments, switching between first-person narration from the significant late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century female religious writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. As Victoria Mackenzie notes in her afterword, Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest book written in English by a woman, while Margery’s dictated The Book of Margery Kempe is the first autobiography in English by anybody at all. As my knowledge of these two figures is pretty limited, it’s hard to say how For Thy Great Pain... would read to somebody who knows more about them; but I thought the clarity and simplicity with which Mackenzie conveyed the ideas these women struggled with was impressive. While both wrestle with their relationship to God, I found that this novella both evoked how serious and important these questions were in the late medieval period, and had resonance for modern readers who don’t consider themselves to be religious.

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. This novella focuses on Julian’s time as an anchoress – she spent the last twenty-plus years of her life in a cell annexed to St Julian's Church in Norwich, with no physical contact with another human being. Mackenzie beautifully handles Julian’s early difficulties in her isolation, and also the reasons why she chooses it. '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. A stillness that doesn't pass as soon as you think yourself into it. I'd thought I would live as slowly as moss in my stone cell. But... I was myself, with all my usual racing thoughts'.

In contrast, Margery is perhaps less obviously sympathetic as she roams around, telling others of her visions and crying publicly and loudly about the sufferings of Christ. Mackenzie writes her with wry humour, letting her desire to be remembered as a saint and comfort herself by thinking how she will be adored by God, Jesus and Mary in heaven even though she is mocked on earth. However, the clever choice to juxtapose Margery’s story with Julian’s allows us to take her on her own terms rather than having to read her as a symbol of how all medieval merchant women engaged with religious faith. We can see how her ostentatious holiness serves her in a patriarchal society, allowing her to do otherwise forbidden things like neglecting her children and refusing to have sex with her husband. While Julian’s backstory is more likely to appeal to the modern reader – tragically widowed, losing her only child, unable to understand Margery’s ingratitude for her fourteen children – Margery brings us closer to the otherness of the medieval past.

Despite the theological subject-matter, this book flowed so naturally that I found it difficult to put down, and even if I was sometimes inclined to skim the Margery sections to get back to Julian, I admired Mackenzie’s intentions in telling both of these stories.

Victoria MacKenzie's debut novel 'For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain' offers a fictional account of a real-life meeting between the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in the early 15th Century. They are now recognised as two of the most important women of their age, but in their lifetimes experienced pain and loss and faced great prejudice and abuse.

Although the two women's meeting is the focal point of MacKenzie's novel, this only occupies the final few pages of the book and I felt that the real interest lay in the accounts the two women give of their own lives leading up to this moment. Writing in short sections which alternate between Margery and Julian, MacKenzie fully inhabits both women's voices and very quickly brings to life both their struggles and their extraordinary visions.

Importantly, MacKenzie takes both women on their own terms and resists the temptation to rationalise or pathologise their religious experiences. While there are aspects of their lives which speak very directly to a modern audience - not the least the ways that Margery in particular is continually belittled by those around her - MacKenzie's account also feels faithful to the times in which both women were living and the ways that they saw the world.

And what beauty and richness there is to be found in their voices! I was especially struck by the lyricism of Julian's observations despite her physical confinement, for instance when she describes herself as "an arrow, sprung from a bow in God's service" or watches "the world coming into being, leaf by leaf, brick by brick, cloud by cloud, as if every day God says Let there be light and creates the world afresh."

Perhaps the greatest tribute I can pay to the novel is that it has motivated me to discover more about these two women by reading their own words. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this novel to review!

I enjoyed this short story, especially about Julian of Norwich. I’ve been interested in her life since reading Revelations of Divine Love years ago. Never having heard of Margery Kempe, I was fascinated by the story of her life.
This is a work of fiction based on these two women lives. Victoria MacKensie has written this book with great imagination and sensitivity. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future.
Thank you to Netgalley and the author for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Victoria MacKenzie’s new novella, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, is set in Norfolk in 1413 and imagines a meeting between two real-life women: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. If these names are familiar to you, you’ll know that they were both English mystics of the medieval period and were also both authors. Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is thought to be the first English work we can be sure was written by a woman, while Margery’s The Book of Margery Kempe is considered to be the first autobiography in the English language.

The stories of the two women only converge towards the end of the book in a meeting which did take place according to Margery herself in The Book of Margery Kempe, but maybe not exactly as it is described here. Victoria MacKenzie recreates the events leading up to their encounter and the sort of conversation they may have had, but before reaching that point she explores the backgrounds of both women, with the perspective alternating between Margery and Julian as they follow very different paths through life.

Little is known of the real Julian’s early life, but MacKenzie suggests here that she may have lost her family to an outbreak of plague and that this, along with an illness during which she experienced visions or ‘shewings’ of Christ, influenced her decision to become an anchoress, secluded in a cell for twenty-three years. Margery, in contrast, doesn’t lock herself away, but remains in the secular world, a wife and mother of fourteen. Like Julian, she begins to have religious visions, but while Julian’s faith is personal and private, Margery prays, weeps and preaches in public, drawing attention to herself and leading to accusations of heresy.

This is Victoria MacKenzie’s debut novel and I admire her for writing something so unusual and original, but although I did like it, I couldn’t quite manage to love it. 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. Maybe if I was a more religious person myself I would have appreciated this book more, but I could still find a lot to interest me in this story of two medieval women whose different personalities and different journeys through life shape the nature of their relationships with God.

Wow! What a book.
Coming from Norfolk and having an interest in the areas history, especially from a feminist point of view, I found this book to be brilliant and really brought two of the most important literary women to life.
This is definitely on my book of the year list and I can't wait for publication to share my thoughts with library users

“A nun is a bride of Christ and so has a nuptial mass, but becoming an anchorite is a death. I had to die to the world.”

Firstly, wow! Victoria Mackenzie’s debut, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, follows the lead-up and aftermath to a meeting between Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, two women who have been blessed (or plagued you might argue) by shewings of Christ. Based on true events, I found myself gripped by this story and the beautiful way the author uses language to tell it: “Midwinter. Night crushes day between her fingers, squeezing the light out of her. A cold thin moon rises, a slip of paper between stars.” I ended up highlighting so many sentences while reading, and I wasn’t surprised to realize that the author’s a poet as well.

Both Margery and Julian experience visions, but while Julian chooses to lock herself away from the world as the anchoress of Norwich, Margery lives her life out in the open (in part due to the responsibilities of her husband and fourteen children) and shares her visions with the world despite the abuses she receives.

The voices of Margery and Julian were so different, yet equally engaging, however as I was reading I found myself questioning Margery’s motives. It wasn’t until we saw Margery from Julian’s perspective that I realized why I was more doubtful of Margery’s intentions: "Her voice swanned and preened and boasted, yet there was another note to her song. Margery Kempe was the loneliest woman I had ever met."

In my mind’s eyes, I tend to see mystics as infallible and humble. Margery, despite her best intentions, is flawed. She is, as Julian senses, boastful. She is proud. She is ambitious in a world where women are expected to be small and quiet. Her behaviour contrasts with Julian whose relationship with God is intensely personal. Despite this Julian isn’t a cardboard trope of what an ideal mystic should be. She struggles with the burden of her self-imposed seclusion from the world and the loss of her husband and young daughter.

I loved how the author was able to show the characters’ vulnerabilities and flaws despite their immense faith. Often when I read about holy figures there’s a disconnect as no matter how well-written I feel as though I am constantly looking up to them. But Julian and Margery are so painfully real that I felt as though I was side by side with them as they battled through their fear, their doubts, their growing self-assurance, etc. Overall, I very much enjoyed this wonderfully written debut and I can’t wait to read more of Victoria Mackenzie’s work.

n 1400s England, two women's stories of faith, motherhood and grief overlap with one another. One is Julian, an anchoress who seeks silence and answers in solitude. The other is Margarey, a mother of fourteen who is ostracised because of her visions of Christ. It's worth mentioning that both Julian and Margarey were real women, and Mackenzie's book does both of them justice in this retelling.

This is a short book, and one that's so compelling it's easy to read in one sitting, but it manages to say a lot about women, spirituality and history itself. Mackenzie's version of medieval England is free of all the dark, gloom and greyness that often crowds depictions of the era. Instead it is full of light - from small connections to nature to the lifelong impact of a closeness with God. Mackenzie manages to make these women's lives, so different to readers, feel incredibly close and intimate.

Balanced alongside this is a focus on the treatment of women - Margarey is punished for visions that, coming from a man, would be celebrated and canonised. This book has a lot to show about the impact of friendship and support shared between women, especially in the face of adversity.

I found this book incredibly moving, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in women's stories, faith, or historical fiction more generally.

Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are the twin protagonists of Mackenzie’s debut. She allows each to tell her life story through alternating first-person strands that only braid together very late on when she posits that Margery visited Julian in her cell and took into safekeeping the manuscript of her “shewings.” I finished reading Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love earlier this year and, apart from a couple of biographical details (she lost her husband and baby daughter to an outbreak of plague, and didn’t leave her cell in Norwich for 23 years), this added little to my experience of her work.

I didn’t know Margery’s story, so found her sections a little more interesting. A married mother of 14, she earned scorn for preaching, prophesying and weeping in public. Again and again, she was told to know her place and not dare to speak on behalf of God or question the clergy. 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. But nowadays, we would doubtless question her mental health – likewise for Julian when you learn that her shewings arose from a time of fevered hallucination. 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.

A fresh and thought-provoking take on two remarkable medieval women. Victoria MacKenzie cleverly uses historical fact and the writings of both women to build an intimate portrait of their inner lives and the challenges they faced at a time of persecution and religious fervour.

This was such an original and fresh piece of writing that will stay with me for a long time. I hadn't heard about the person in the book or the events but this just made it so much more interesting