In 1373, a dying woman was told that all shall be well
She was thirty years old and believed she had hours left. What she heard in those hours became the earliest book in English known to have been written by a woman.
On May 8, 1373, a curate administered last rites to a woman in Norwich, England, while she lay in what everyone assumed was her deathbed. As a crucifix was held above her, her sight failed — and then, over several hours, she received fifteen visions of Christ's Passion. A sixteenth came the following night.
She recovered. She spent the rest of her life in a small room attached to a church, living as an anchoress — an enclosed contemplative who could speak to visitors through a window but never leave.
The woman we know only as Julian of Norwich spent decades turning those few hours into a theological reflection of unusual tenderness. The phrase she returned to again and again was the one she said she had heard directly: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
She did not mean that nothing bad happens. She had written during the Black Death, during the Peasants' Revolt, during a century that was ending badly in almost every direction. She meant something harder to dismiss: that the love underlying existence is not defeated by the suffering on the surface of it.
T. S. Eliot quoted her three times in Little Gidding in 1943, the middle of another terrible war. The lines still hold.