Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was the youngest of nine children born to Louis and Zélie Martin — themselves canonised in 2015 as a couple. Five daughters survived to adulthood; all five entered religious life, four into the same Carmel of Lisieux. Zélie died of breast cancer when Thérèse was four.
At fifteen, after petitioning Pope Leo XIII in person at a papal audience, she received special permission to enter the cloistered Carmel of Lisieux — a closed contemplative monastery — far below the canonical age. She would never leave it. There she lived in obscurity for nine years.
Under obedience to her superior (her own sister Pauline) she wrote a brief account of her early life that, with two later manuscripts, was published after her death as Story of a Soul. In it she articulated her 'Little Way' of spiritual childhood — sanctity through the smallest, most hidden acts of love, accessible to the ordinary soul. The book has been translated into more than sixty languages.
She died of tuberculosis at twenty-four, having predicted on her deathbed: 'I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth — I will let fall a shower of roses.' She was canonised in 1925, named Patroness of the Missions in 1927, and declared a Doctor of the Church by John Paul II in 1997 — the third woman and youngest person ever so honoured.