The life of Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball

The Life of Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball is a Victorian devotional biography published in 1881 by Henry James Coleridge, the English Jesuit writer and long-time editor of The Month. Its subject is Frances Ball (1794-1861), the Dublin-born woman who trained with the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in York and returned home to establish it in Ireland.

From the house at Rathfarnham that she named Loreto, Ball built a network of convent schools that spread to India, Mauritius, Gibraltar, Canada and Australia within her lifetime. Coleridge follows her from her schooling and religious formation through the foundation years and the long work of sending sisters overseas, drawing heavily on letters and community records.

The book is written from inside the tradition it describes: hagiographic in tone, more interested in edification than in critical distance. It remains a primary source for the early history of the Loreto sisters and for nineteenth-century Irish Catholic education.