Gertrude entered the monastery of Helfta in Saxony as a child of five and never left it. She was a scholar before she was a mystic — Latin, grammar, the Fathers — and in 1281, at twenty-five, the visions began. The Herald of Divine Love records them, and among them is the one to which the whole devotion to the Sacred Heart looks back: her head laid on the breast of Christ, the beating of His Heart audible, and her asking St. John why he had written nothing of it in his Gospel. She is the only woman the Church calls 'the Great'.

The novena asks her for a share in that love, and then does something most novenas never do. It states the petition plainly, and then adds: 'but if it be not His holy will to grant us the desires of our hearts, obtain for us that we may rest content in what He wills.' That sentence is the difference between a novena and a transaction.

Her feast was 15 November when this novena was printed and is 16 November in the current calendar, so the nine days run 7–15 November. Her own two prayers are on this site under the prayers of the saints.

A novena is nine consecutive days (or nine consecutive weeks of one fixed day) of the same prayer for the same intention; a day missed breaks it, and it is begun again. Confession and Communion during the nine days, or on the last, were the ordinary conditions for the plenary indulgence.