Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin (1873-1897) was born at Alençon in Normandy, the youngest of the five surviving daughters of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and Zélie Guérin, a lacemaker. After her mother's death in 1877 the family moved to Les Buissonnets in Lisieux, and at fifteen, after a personal plea to Pope Leo XIII, she entered the Carmelite convent of Lisieux, where three of her sisters were also nuns. She took the name Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, served as assistant novice mistress, wrote poems, plays and letters as well as her autobiographical manuscripts, and died of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897 at the age of twenty-four. She was canonized by Pius XI in 1925, named co-patron of the missions in 1927, and declared a Doctor of the Church by John Paul II in 1997.
Frequently Cited
“I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues.”
“My God, I choose everything, I will not be a Saint by halves, I am not afraid of suffering for Thee, I only fear one thing, and that is to do my own will.”
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
