Mother of Invention

There is nothing conventional about the life and religious journey of Grace Costin. After a family tragedy caused her to reject God, she began on the long path back to faith through pioneering social work, a solo journey across the United States and a brief interlude as one of the first women police officers. Following a fleeting ministry as Sister Teresa in the Order of St Anne, she met the charismatic priest Bernard Walke, with whom she formed a loving but combative working partnership before experiencing a calling to create a religious Order unlike any that had existed before. Her quest took her from remote parishes in Cornwall to the slums of Paisley, an inner-city parish in 1930s London and the Isle of Wight until finally she found what she was searching for in the personal ads of the Daily Telegraph-a "Typical Thatched Devon farmhouse".

And so in the middle of the Second World War, aged 54 with a heart condition and no money, she set out to transform the run-down house in a remote corner of Devon into the Community she had dreamed of for so long. With the help of a series of remarkable women she had attracted along the way, she created Posbury St Francis-a community, not a convent, with sisters, not nuns, and a Mother, but not a Mother Superior.

Mother of Invention is the story of how a woman, the daughter of a bigamous marriage, with no money, connections or academic background, founded her own religious Order which, at its height, was visited by over 2,000 people a year.