"Founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1800 and canonised in 1925, Madeleine Sophie Barat is the subject of this major biography. By removing the masks which hagiography and sainthood created around her, Phil Kilroy represents Sophie Barat as a religious leader, an educator and an individual of importance in the France of her times.".

"Madeleine Sophie Barat: A Life tracks her development from her childhood in the Bourgogne, through her leadership of a community of women devoted to education both in France and abroad, to her death in Paris in 1865. Several profound movements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Europe marked her life, including the Revolution with its consequent volatile political situations, as well as the tangled complexities of Gallicanism and Ultramontanism.

This book also explores Sophie Barat's spiritual journey, from her dark Jansenistic roots to her belief in a loving, warm and tender God, as expressed in devotion to the Sacred Heart."--BOOK JACKET.