Edel Quinn meant to be a Poor Clare. Tuberculosis stopped her at twenty-four and she was sent to a sanatorium for eighteen months, from which she emerged incurable. She joined the Legion of Mary instead, worked in Dublin, and in 1936 asked to be sent to Africa as an envoy. The doctors said she would not survive the voyage. Frank Duff, who had founded the Legion, let her go.
She spent seven and a half years in East and Central Africa — Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Nyasaland, Mauritius — travelling in an ageing Ford over roads that were not roads, alone, coughing blood, founding Legion branches in one mission after another and handing them to Africans to run. There were hundreds of them by the end. She did it in a period when the leadership of Catholic organisations in Africa was not usually placed in African hands, and the praesidia she founded outlived her by generations.
She collapsed in 1943, recovered enough to carry on, and died at Nairobi on 12 May 1944, at thirty-six. She is buried in the missionaries' cemetery there, among people she had come to work with rather than to rule. John Paul II declared her Venerable on 15 December 1994.