After nine years as a Carmelite nun, having fulfilled various offices such as sacristan and assistant to the novice mistress, in her last eighteen months in Carmel she fell into a night of faith, in which she is said to have felt Jesus was absent and been tormented by doubts that God existed.

Therese was born on Rue Saint-Blaise, in Alençon, France on 2 January 1873, and was the daughter of Marie-Azélie Guérin (usually called Zélie), and Louis Martin who was a jeweler and watchmaker.

Zélie, possessed of a strong, active temperament, wished to serve the sick, and had also considered entering consecrated life, but the prioress of the canonesses regular of the Hôtel-Dieu in Alençon had discouraged her outright.

In addition to Therese, they were: "A dreamer and brooder, an idealist and romantic, [the father] gave touching and naïve pet names [to his daughters]: Marie was his 'diamond', Pauline his 'noble pearl', Céline 'the bold one'.

(Madame Martin to Pauline, 21 November 1875) She was educated in a very Catholic environment, including Mass attendance at 5:30 a.m., the strict observance of fasts, and prayer to the rhythm of the liturgical year.

Described as generally a happy child, she also manifested other emotions, and often cried: "Céline is playing with the little one with some bricks […] I have to correct poor baby who gets into frightful tantrums when she can't have her own way.

On 1 December, Léonie, covered in eczema and hiding her hair under a short mantilla, had returned to Les Buissonnets after just seven weeks of the Poor Clares regime in Alençon", and her sisters were helping her get over her sense of failure and humiliation.

Back at Les Buissonnets as every year, Therese "as was the custom for French children, had left her shoes on the hearth, empty in anticipation of gifts, not from Father Christmas but from the Child Jesus, who was imagined to travel through the air bearing toys and cakes.

[44] In May 1887, Therese approached her 63-year-old father Louis, who was recovering from a small stroke, while he sat in the garden one Sunday afternoon and told him that she wanted to celebrate the anniversary of "her conversion" by entering Carmel before Christmas.

When Therese entered the second wing, containing the cells and sickrooms in which she was to live and die, which had been standing only ten years, "What she found was a community of very aged nuns, some odd and cranky, some sick and troubled, some lukewarm and complacent.

When Therese entered the convent Marie de Gonzague was 54, a woman of changeable humour, jealous of her authority, used sometimes in a capricious manner; this had for effect, a certain laxity in the observance of established rules.

"In the sixties and seventies of the [nineteenth] century an aristocrat in the flesh counted for far more in a petty bourgeois convent than we can realize nowadays ... the superiors appointed Marie de Gonzague to the highest offices as soon as her novitiate was finished ... in 1874 began the long series of terms as prioress".

In this period Therese deepened the sense of her vocation; to lead a hidden life, to pray and offer her suffering for priests, to forget herself, to increase discreet acts of charity.

In itself, veneration of the childhood of Jesus was a Carmelite heritage of the seventeenth century – it concentrated upon the staggering humiliation of divine majesty in assuming the shape of extreme weakness and helplessness.

The piety of her time was fed more on commentaries, but Therese had asked Céline to get the Gospels and the Epistles of St Paul bound into a single small volume which she could carry on her heart.

[78] "Another cherished image was that of the newly invented elevator, a vehicle Therese used many times over to describe God's grace, a force that lifts us to heights we can't reach on our own".

[79][80] Martha of Jesus, a novice who spent her childhood in a series of orphanages and who was described by all as emotionally unbalanced, with a violent temper, gave witness during the beatification process of the 'unusual dedication and presence of her young teacher.

Therese used Henri-Alexandre Wallon's history of Joan of Arc – a book her uncle Isidore had given to the Carmel – to help her write two plays, "pious recreations", "small theatrical pieces performed by a few nuns for the rest of the community, on the occasion of certain feast days".

On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less[86]In her quest for sanctity and in order to attain holiness and to express her love of God, she believed that it was not necessary to accomplish heroic acts or great deeds.

[93] In May 1897, Therese wrote to Father Adolphe Roulland, "... my way is entirely one of trust and love ..."[94] and: Sometimes when I read certain spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown through a thousand obstacles, surrounded by a host of illusions, my poor mind gets tired very quickly, I close the learned book which breaks my head and dries up my heart and I take the Holy Scripture.

So everything seems luminous to me, a single word reveals infinite horizons to my soul, perfection seems easy to me, I see that it suffices to recognize one's nothingness and to abandon oneself like a child in the arms of the Good Lord.

"[52] In October 1895 a young seminarian and subdeacon of the White Fathers, Maurice Bellière, asked the Carmel of Lisieux for a nun who would support – by prayer and sacrifice – his missionary work, and the souls that were in the future to be entrusted to him.

[113] The second is a three-page letter, written in September 1896, at the request of her eldest sister Marie, who, aware of the seriousness of Therese's illness, asked her to set down her "little doctrine".

Since 1973, two centenary editions of Terese's original, unedited manuscripts, including The Story of a Soul, her letters, poems,[115] prayers and the plays she wrote for the monastery recreations have been published in French.

[121] Therese composed a Consecration to the Holy Face, August 6, 1896[122] for herself and two other nuns in the Carmel: Geneviève of St Teresa (her biological sister Céline) and Sr Marie of the Trinity.

[138] By the apostolic letter Divini Amoris Scientia (The Science of Divine Love) of 19 October 1997, Pope John Paul II declared Therese Doctor of the Church,[139] one of four women so named, the others being Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen.

In 2011, the letters of Blessed Zélie and Louis Martin were published in English as A Call to a Deeper Love: The Family Correspondence of the Parents of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, 1863–1885.

[52] On 7 January 2013, in Valencia, Spain, the diocesan process opened to examine a "presumed miracle" attributed to their intercession: the healing of a newborn girl, Carmen Pérez Pons, who was born prematurely four days after their beatification and who inexplicably recovered from severe bleeding of the brain and other complications.

Only highly retouched photographs were made public until the death of Céline Martin, as the Carmel of Lisieux wanted Therese's iconography to be more consistent with the traditional representation of saints.

[157] As pastor of St. Francis Xavier Church in Carfin, Lanarkshire, he built a replica of the Grotto at Lourdes and included a small shrine honoring Therese with a statue donated by the Legion of Mary.