“All Shall Be Well”: The Sickbed Where Julian of Norwich Heard It

Read Time:13 Minute, 39 Second Someone says it at a hospital bedside. Someone writes it in a card when they cannot think of anything else to write. It is stitched on cushions and printed on mugs: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The line is credited to Julian of Norwich, a woman who lived in England in the 1300s. That credit is right, as far as it goes. The words are in her book. But she never claimed them as her own. She wrote that she heard them, lying in bed, on a night when she expected to die. That changes the sentence. A promise that all shall be well sounds one way on a mug. It sounds another way coming out of a plague city, to a sick woman of thirty, in answer to the hardest question she had. What “all shall be well” is actually claiming Start with what the line does not say. It does not say all is well. Every verb in it points forward. Julian’s present was a sickroom. The promise is about a future she could not see.

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