Elizabeth Prout stands at both the heart and the crossroads of nineteenth-century history. From her birth in 1820 as the daughter of a cooper in a brewery, beside a cotton mill and an ironworks in the suburbs of Shrewsbury, to her death of tuberculosis, beside the glass and chemical works of St Helens, in 1864, she experienced the industrial, educational, social, economic and religious changes that transformed English society at that time. It was, however, her close friendships with those two giants of the spiritual life, the Passionists Blessed Dominic Barberi and Father Ignatius Spencer,...