Hullo,

I’ve had a frustrating work week in which I feel like I’ve not been heard at all, so here are two women writers who made their voices heard regardless of their circumstances.

Enjoy this obituary of the Iranian poet Simin Behbahani:

The danger, she knew, was in doing the censors’ work for them, by heeding the voice in her mind that had begun to warn her: “don’t write this, they won’t allow it to be published.”

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21614085-simin-behbahani-lioness-iran-died-august-19th-aged-87-simin-behbahani

Here’s an article on Mother Julian of Norwich, one of my favourite thinkers and also the first woman to write a book in English. In the mid 1300s she prayed for, and received, a series of visions of God’s love. She then took at least twenty years to write a full exposition of those visions and what they meant, in a time when women weren’t generally considered to be (a) adequate people to receive visions from God or (b) adequate people to write books. Her writing is beautiful – intimate and earthy and almost impossibly full of love.

The long timelines don’t stop at her taking twenty years to fully understand and write her visions. Her influence on mainstream theology began to be felt 500 years later, after a 1901 translation of her work into modern English and (in the intervening years) the advent of mass production. I think about this every time I feel frustrated, like everything is moving too slowly –  it always speaks to me about how little ability we have to estimate our long term influence, how little we understand how many lives we can or will touch, and how lightly we can value the gifts that we have been given.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mirabai-starr/julian-of-norwich_b_4115736.html

Finally, what could be more feminist than time away from the kitchen? Nothing. Have a recipe for microwave jam sponge, ready in 13 minutes. My mother made this a lot when I was growing up.

http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/165/microwave-sponge-pudding.aspx

Alex.