The youngest of nine children, Saint Thérèse was born in 1873 to a watchmaker and a lacemaker. Her mother passed away when she was young, and she struggled with tuberculosis for many years. By the age of fifteen, she wanted to enter a Carmelite convent, going so far as to travel to Rome for special dispensation. In the last years of her life, Thérèse wrote her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, describing her theology of ‘the little way,’ which focused on doing good through small sacrifices. She died of consumption at the age of twenty-four, less than nine years after she entered the community. Despite her short time on the earth, she “gained a reputation for sanctity that soon stretched around the world.” She would be canonized in 1925. Pope St. John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

Sources:

McCartin, James P. “The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Thérèse of Lisieux, and the Transformation of U.S. Catholic Piety, 1865-1940.” U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 2 (2007): 53–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25156625.

Pope, Barbara Corrado. “A Heroine without Heroics: The Little Flower of Jesus and Her Times.” Church History 57, no. 1 (1988): 46–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/3165902.

You can read Saint Thérèse's pamphlets through JSTOR:

Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus

Sœur Thérèse: Carmelite of the Convent of Lisieux