Book Description

The Carmel at Lixieux celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Flower's death by issuing her correspondence in its completeness - every letter, note, inscription in her handwriting that is known to exist. At the end of the famous 'Autobiography' there is a small selection, some fifty letters, even these neither in chronological order, nor all as they were written. (Prudence caused certain modifications of her actual wording of theological matters and frequently passages from one letter were inserted in another). Now we have two hundred and forty-six letters, exactly as the Saint wrote them, and in the order of their writing. They are all there, from the notes she wrote as a child with a big sister guiding her hand to the inscription she wrote on the back of a picture of Our Lady when death was upon her. Autobiographically the Letters are more revealing the the Autobiography itself, precisely because she wrote them without any notion of publication - many of them "scribbled in haste", with the writer standing up, sometimes in a corridor, without light, almost without ink. Certainly they "document" the 'Autobiography' most remarkably and enable the reader to watch Thérèse grow. The Little Way becomes amazingly vivid when we see it thus in operation from week to week. Especially valuable are the letter to the two missionaries whose spiritual sister she was. The Abbé Combes provides the biographical framework so that one can "place" each letter - can know for instance that a particularly gay letter was written while the Saint was suffering agonies from the disease that killed her; and every person or thing referred to in the letters is elucidated in footnotes..