Crossing to Avalon
A Woman's Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine
Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen's magnificent spiritual autobiography is the story of a call to adventure, the mystery of the feminine, and the extraordinary pilgrimage that marked her midlife passage. Bolen frames her search for meaning at midlife as a quest for the mysterious lost Grail of the Arthurian legend. For Bolen, the Grail represents the elusive object of a lifelong search for what is missing from our lives as well as from our culture. Bolen's pursuit takes her on an incredible journey to Europe that leads her to discover the importance of her own history, the changes and challenges at midlife, and the meaning of the goddess in the lives of women. During a particularly difficult time in her life, Jean Bolen quite unexpectedly received a package in the mail from England. Inside was a beautiful gold pendant in the shape of an ancient archetypal image along with an invitation to make a pilgrimage to Chartres, Glastonbury, Iona, and other sacred sites in Europe. It was sent by a total stranger, a woman who had come across one of the first copies of Goddesses in Everywoman, Bolen's groundbreaking work on women and archetypal myth. The synchronicity of the invitation was astonishing to Bolen, and she knew instinctively that she had been invited to embark on a quest that would change her life. So began the extraordinary pilgrimage that heralded Bolen's midlife passage. Inspired by The Mists of Avalon, this tale of her European adventure is interwoven with penetrating psychological and spiritual insights as well as lore from Europe's sacred sites. While on her pilgrimage, Bolen reflects on the mystical experience that brought her into medicine, her awakening to the archetypal feminine through the experience of childbirth, the personal transformations that occurred after her divorce, the sources and significance of midlife depression, and the importance of female friendship. This multilayered account journeys through and beyond the personal to reflect the mythological significance of the midlife search for meaning and renewal.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Spiritual, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
A fuller profile for choosing with more confidence—not just another copy of the preview.
Spiritual · Nonfiction
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Shadowed tone · Urgent pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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A quick reading snapshot
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- ISBN-13
- 978-0-0625-0272-8
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL9245099M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Spiritual, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- What question is the author really asking beneath the book’s main argument?
- Which claim challenges one of your familiar assumptions?
- What remains unresolved—and is that uncertainty useful?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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