Victoria MacKenzie, "For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain"

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer and poet based in Scotland. Her debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), explores the lives of the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. She has won a number of writing prizes including a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Emerging Writer Award from Moniack Mhor, and has held writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia. Her second novel, Brantwood, about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Her website is here. 

About For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a novel based on the lives of two real women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Both women have visions of Christ, but to claim direct communication with God is heresy – and the punishment for heresy is to be burnt alive. Using intertwined first-person narratives, Julian and Margery tell the stories of their lives. Margery is a traumatised mother of fourteen, full of shame about sex and childbirth, and hounded by the church for talking about her visions. Julian is an anchoress – haunted by grief, she has lived for twenty-three years in a single room. She has told no one of her visions, but she has written them down in secret. Her book, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book in English by a woman.

The novel culminates in a meeting between the two women at the window of Julian’s anchoress cell, where they confide their deepest fears. Margery is inspired to return home and dictate the story of her own life: The Book of Margery Kempe is the first known autobiography in English. For Thy Great Pain is a novel about grief, motherhood and grace, and it’s also the story of the beginning of women’s writing.

You can read a review of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, by Victoria MacKenzie

JULIAN

Those early days, weeks, months, years of being in my cell – I am glad I will not live through them again. Though I knew that God would send me trials and tribulations, I did not predict the form that these would take. 

I had thought I was ready for the life of an anchoress. 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. I’d thought I would step out of my life as soon as I stepped into the cell. But I was still me. Nothing had changed. I was myself, with all my usual racing thoughts and yearnings and memories and foolishness.

Nothing can prepare you for spending the rest of your life in a single room. Never to be touched by another human being. Never to run. Never to feel the rain on your face. Never to walk in the garden and see flowers unfolding their colours and scents. 

I had died to the world, died to my old life, but I was not dead. 

Sara brought me food and firewood, but in those early days we did not know each other. She was careful to follow Master Thomas’ orders not to distract me with what he called ‘women’s chatter’. She treated me like a holy saint, whispering ‘Mother Julian, I have your supper.’ I could almost hear her curtseying on the other side of the curtain. 

How I yearned for women’s chatter.

Pattie McCarthy, "wifthing"

 

Pattie McCarthy is the author of seven books of poetry and over a dozen chapbooks. wifthing (2021) is her sixth book with Apogee Press — previous Apogee books by McCarthy include, most recently, Quiet Book (2016) and Marybones (2012). She is a non-tenure track Associate Professor in the English Department at Temple University, where she teaches Literature and Creative Writing. 

You can read more work by Pattie McCarthy on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

About wifthing

By Susan Howe

Pattie McCarthy's meticulously researched wifthing sequence traverses history's gaps and silences throughout the medieval English vocabularies she has always been drawn to. Beginning with the fourteenth century English mystic Margery Kempe who wrote through spirit dictation, wifthing scours vows of chastity, devotions, pregnant queens, cross-dressing heretics, goodwives, births, daugherthings, boychiks, court records, kaleidoscopic New England witchcraft testimonies. McCarthy's ear is sharp, her eye, demanding and disciplined. Eighty unpunctuated sonnets, both austere and rebellious, are carefully arranged on each page as verbal grid maps through pre- and postmodernity. Small things, various hagiographies, fabric [Latin textus], piecework syntax, 'The goodwyf will call you back.' Through threads and threats of mothering history the intercession of love pardoned and restored with fury and reverence.

Below, you can read three poems from the book.

From wifthing, by Pattie McCarthy

margerykempething

you wolf   what is this cloth that you put on
you strumpet   a dated noun of middle
english unknown origin   not of her
own cunnyng   thou art comyn here to lure
our wifthings from us & whether she means 
with her heart what she does with her mouth   
vernacular patience with ostentatious 
weeping it's a lucky creature escaped the fire
take it in the barn & sound
it out figure it out amongst yourselves
margery kempe gives birth & gives birth & gives
birth & gives birth & gives birth & gives birth &
gives birth & gives birth & gives birth & gives birth
& gives birth & gives birth & gives birth & gives
birth

 
qweyne wifthing

my daughter asked me how babies are made
I told her they're made when a tudor twice
your age fucks you you've got to lean
into it like a volta or a polska
& like a volta   which elizabeth
the future will dance with leicester     she'll make
it semi-respectable but not dignified
doughter & heyr   keep your dress from flying 
up with your left hand & his right hand firm
beneath your busk his left thigh against your right
a busk is a splinter a stiffening
strip that shifts      the volta should appear here
tastes like something on fire in my mouth
where is his body now   the relict asks


goodwifthing

tastes like something on fire in my mouth
I want to live forever whisper
that into your husband's ear tonight abed
my invisible scrutinized midlife
goodwyf body   minivan & tankini
my children say back to me phrases I 
say to them in darkness things fall silent
at dinner you could start an argument
this creature bled for fifty-two days &
the goodwyf body splits up the middle
winged textured like paint two figures
looking at a landscape shoulder to shoulder
facing opposite directions it comes
back to you like this without the word for it