The lines murmured by Serena as she holds Offred's womb in the hope of feeling the baby kick - "All will be well... And all will be well... All manner of things will be well" - is a near quotation to a passage that goes back to Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), a Christian mystic from Norfolk, England. She is known for her 16 visions recorded in _Revelations of Divine Love_, the earliest surviving book in English by a woman.
Most English majors, however, are more likely have run across it as a passage from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," the fourth and final piece of four interconnected long poems written and published by Eliot between 1936 and 1943.
The lines from the poem read:
"History may be servitude, / History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, / The places and faces, with the self which, as it could, loved them, / To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. / Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well. ..."
Most English majors, however, are more likely have run across it as a passage from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," the fourth and final piece of four interconnected long poems written and published by Eliot between 1936 and 1943.
The lines from the poem read:
"History may be servitude, / History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, / The places and faces, with the self which, as it could, loved them, / To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. / Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well. ..."