British novelist Hilary Mantel reviews some books and discusses physical suffering and young female saints

What should Jesus want her to suffer? To talk about female masochism seems reductive and unhelpful. You have to look the saints in the face; say how the facts of their lives revolt and frighten you, but when you have got over being satirical and atheistical, and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first, you must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena. Both Gemma and Thérèse believed suffering had an effect that was not limited in time or space. They could, just for a while, share the pain of crucifixion. They could offer up their pain to buy time out for the souls suffering in purgatory. Their suffering could be an expiation for the sins of others, it could be a restitution, a substitution. Margaret of Cortona said: ‘I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.’ Behind the ecstasy is a ferocious moral drive, a purpose – and no doubt a sexual drive, too. Simone Weil believed that ‘sexual energy constitutes the physiological foundation’ of mystical experience. Why must this be true? Because, Weil said, ‘we haven’t anything else with which to love.’

Such loving isn’t easy. Thérèse, dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, was tormented by the thought of banquets. Gemma, too, dreamed of food; would it be all right, she asked her confessor, to ask Jesus to take away her sense of taste? Permission was granted. She arranged with Jesus that she should begin to expiate, through her own suffering, all the sins committed by priests: after this bargain was struck, for 60 days she vomited whenever she tried to eat. Her guardian angel was her constant attendant and is addressed in the language of the playground and the kitchen. Sometimes he brought her coffee, and when she was weak he helped her into bed. Once he manifested in the kitchen, while the servant was making meatballs. The devil showed himself, too. He was ‘a . . . little man, black, very black, little, very little . . . a tiny, tiny man . . . all covered in black hair’. He would grimace and threaten at the foot of her bed; he would jump on the bed and pummel her; when she called on Jesus, he rolled around the floor, cursing. Once he came in the form of a great black dog, and put his paws on her shoulders. Gemma had the bruises to show, and the charred paper where Satan had tried to burn her writings.