Although she had been writing and publishing for more than forty years, Hannah Green left behind her an extremely small body of work when she died in 1996 shortly before her seventieth birthday. In addition to a few short stories and one children’s book, it consists of a novel, The Dead of the House, and Little Saint, which her publisher has aptly called “part celebration, part biography, part prayer, as well as an ode to joy, life, death, and the transcendent.” It centers around the life and legend of Saint Foy, a twelve-year-old girl martyred in 303, and the village of Conques in the south of France, where her bones, enshrined, constitute the “golden spark” that drew pilgrims to it for centuries and that still animates the life of its present inhabitants.

Hannah Green grew up in Glendale, near Cincinnati, Ohio, and spent her summers in northern Michigan on the Old Mission Peninsula of Grand Traverse Bay. The Dead of the House, a moving evocation of her childhood in those places, found many delighted readers when it was published by Doubleday in 1972. Thomas Lask called it “a delicate and lovely novel, a work of recovery—something to shore the spirit against the ruins,” and Richard Ellmann said that reading it was like falling in love: “I was, for as long as it took, able to surrender my own callousness and smugness to the ecstasy that is fiction, that is art.” When Jeannette Watson of Books