The Ark Library 

In the year 1897 a girl died at the age of twenty-four in a convent in Normandy, she had lived a life of complete seclusion, her burial was witnessed only by a few friends. Today she is a canonised saint, known all over the world. Her convent at Lisieux is one of the most famous places of pilgrimages, churches in every country are dedicated to her, and the lesson of her spirituality is followed by the learned and the uninstructed alike. No marvel of this kind is without its secret, none, likewise, is secure from being mis-interpreted.
Fr. Martindale rescued for many the true visage of Aloysius Gonzaga from the plaster saint which well-meant attempts at edification had created. Henri Ghéon started his study of the saint in an attitude of resistance to the sentimentalised pictures of St. Teresa that he had found about him. "She was not for me. I could not deny that she was for my time, but on this point I was not of my time. The tinselled and sugary manifestations of devotion to the 'little saint' (the abuse of this diminutive drove me frantic) had succesfully hidden from me the greatness and perhaps originality that was surely hers. There were too many roses, too many flowers of all sorts. I could see nothing but roses; a few thorns underneath them, of course, but then any saint without thorns is an impossibility. I reverenced her in her statue - from afar". But he came to pierce these appearances and to find the saint of whom he now writes.
In this book St. Teresa is shown as a child innately proud, passionate and self-willed; as a woman, equal and organising genius and excelling her in firmness, even hardness, of character. For one reader who may be shocked at the ruthlessness with which M. Ghéon cuts through a highly coloured and extravagant convention there will be a hundred grateful at last to understand the real persona who has lived and handed down a vital truth.