Too Small a World: The Life of Francesca Cabrini

Description

*Too Small a World* is the bestselling biography of Mother Francesca Cabrini (1850-1917), an Italian-American religious sister who founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic religious institute, which became a major support to the Italian immigrants to the United States in the 19th century. Sister Cabrini was also the first naturalized citizen of the United States to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1946. Born in Northern Italy in 1850, Sister Cabrini was a woman of great compassion and courage. Inspired by her deep faith in Jesus Christ, she saw her life as a mission to relieve suffering and serve those in need—in particular the poor and excluded. Sister Cabrini established health, education and care centres in the U.S.A. and Latin America, Europe and England, becoming an inspiration to all those whose lives she touched.Theodore Maynard (1890-1956) was an English poet, literary critic, and historian. He was the author of twenty-seven books of Catholic history and biography, as well as nine collections of his own poems and numerous other literary works. Born in 1890 in India to missionaries for the Plymouth Brethren, he was educated in England and became a Baptist. Crediting G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) with bringing him to Catholicism, he worked odd jobs in the United States between 1909-1911 before returning to England and being received into the Catholic Church in 1913. He began publishing poetry, reviews, and essays in the New Witness, London Poetry Review and London Times, amongst others, and his first collection of poems, Laughs and Whifts of Song, was published in 1915. In 1918 Maynard married Sara Casey, herself a novelist and playwright, and accepted a teaching position in San Rafael, California in 1920. In 1925 he began teaching at Catholic colleges in New York and New Jersey and obtained his bachelor's and master's degree from Fordham University. In 1927 his anthology, The Book of Modern Catholic Verse, was published, and its companion, The Book of Modern Catholic Prose, the year after. In 1927 he was offered the position of chairman of the English department at Georgetown University, and the family moved to Washington in 1928. Maynard's first book of history, DeSoto and the Conquistadores, appeared in 1930 and attracted the attention of both popular and academic reviewers. He took a temporary post at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland from 1934-1936 before turning to writing full-time; his bestseller, Too Small a World, was published in 1945. Maynard's wife Sara died of tuberculosis in 1945. He married Kathleen Sheehan in 1946 and moved to Port Washington, New York, where Maynard died of a heart attack on October 18, 1956.