The Queen Radegund of history, patron saint of prisoners and captives, was born in 518, and as a young girl captured by, and forced to marry, the Frankish king Clotair. She later escaped to God, and founded the monastery of the Holy Cross, where she became famous for her visions, tended the sick, and lived as an ordinary nun, handing the running of the place over to St Agnes.

In Women in the Wall Julia O'Faolain uses the history of Queen Radegund to try to answer fundamental questions about women's role in society, and to discover the reasons behind vocations. In the process, as she admits, she does some violence to history, imagining Radegund to have been involved in a political plot to put an orthodox Christian prince on the throne in order to combat disorder and Arianism. A sub-plot involves Ingunda, the imagined daughter of Agnes by the poet-priest Fortunatus, who, horrified at the discovery of her true parentage, has herself walled-up to expiate her mother's sin. Although this practice is of doubtful historical validity, it here serves well as a symbol for the buried individuality of womankind. Ingunda is accidentally killed as a result of Radegund's involvement in power politics, Agnes turns anchoress, and the monastery is handed over to a cynical woman who will comply with the state's orders to achieve personal ambition.

The story itself works well. It is written in a clear, tough style, and the men and women convince as living people as well as in the sharply contrasting attitudes they represent. Miss O'Faolain, however, judges the past with the prejudices of modern psychology and political theory. She therefore leaves out of account the one explanation for people's actions which was most demonstrably obvious to their fellows: the remarkable change that the Christian faith brought about in some of those who practiced it. In those early days, Christianity was still its true radical self, and its uncomfortable saints were more aware of the guidance of the Holy Spirit than that of Rome. St Cesarius, whose Rule the real Radegund adopted, said:

A man worships that on which his mind is intent during prayer. Whoever in his prayers thinks of public affairs … worships them rather than God.

Miss O'Faolain's characters see the truth in flashes. Ingunda recognizes that God has withdrawn because she has "rubbed out her true self". Agnes knows her real sin is not the paltry one of having slept with Fortunatus, but the large one of failing to have the guts to save herself and her child. However, in her fashionable wish to explain visions as sexuality, vocations as perverted power mania, Miss O'Faolain misses the nub of the matter: that God, through Christ, had challenged women as well as men to be individuals, even if this meant attacking the institutions of society. We might, today, blame Radegund for having accepted the traditional female role in binding up the wounds inflicted by men's violence and ambition: we could hardly accuse her of a desire for personal power.