The Eagle And the Dove

a Study in Contrasts; St Teresa of Avila, St Thérèse of Lisieux

Plot

Vita Sackville-West was a prolific British author, poet and memoirist in the early 20th-Century who is known not only for her writing, but for her not-so-private, private life. While married to the diplomat Harold Nicolson, she conducted a series of scandalous amorous liaisons with many women, including the brilliant Virginia Woolf.

The lives of these two saints with similar names could hardly be more contrasting. St. Teresa, reformer of the Carmelites, 'busy woman and great saint', endured the religious mania of sixteenth-century Spain and lived in a state of near perpetual ecstasy. Thérèse, on the other hand, lived the quiet life of a nun in late-nineteenth-century France, was meek, devout and perhaps rather dim. She became a saint of the common people, largely because of the ordinariness of her life (excepting the odd vision).