[Hannah Green], without sentiment or bathos, shows us how that longing for perfection, and for the virtues embodied by St. Foy and all the other early Christian martyrs and saints, transform people who live bang up against brutality, starvation and repression. We who live in our safe material world miss the apparitions of the other world.

LITTLE SAINT: The Hours of Saint Foy By Hannah Green Random, 352 pages, $38.95

It is an odd thing to have one's most treasured ambition achieved so young. Could there be a greater curse for a young writer than having The New York Times proclaim your first novel a "classic work" and "delicately distilled perfection"? Hannah Green's The Dead of the House was published in 1972, and although the famed editor, New Yorker short-story writer and writing professor had the whole literary world at her feet, it took her almost 30 years to produce another book.

Even then, on first glance her choice of subject was odd. During that time, she fell in love with one of the most endearing of Christian martyrs. In 303 AD, the delicate, beautiful and willful 12-year-old St. Foy was betrayed by her parents, tortured by one of the last Roman emperors and then beheaded for refusing to sprinkle salt over an offering to Diana.

What Green, who died recently (this book was published posthumously), describes in Little Saint: The Hours of Saint Foy is 24 hours in the village of Conques in southeast France where, in the church in the village square, a statue of St. Foy is sheltered and where, as much as possible, Green and her painter husband Jack spent their time.

Lately there have been several books -- the kind of book that is well reviewed by The New York Times -- by women who describe beautifully their journey toward faith. Kathleen Norris's Cloister Walk and the earlier Dakota: A Spiritual Geography are both liable to be likened to Little Saint . Annie Dillard published a slim volume, the third of a trilogy, about her journey toward God, and Anne Lamott last year delivered Traveling Mercies , a set of sweet essays about her hands-on conversion to a Christian faith, from unhappy bohemian godlessness and drunken disarray.

Hannah Green can not be said to fall into this category. Her book, rather than being a tidy emotional progress through the various stages of religious transformation, is more subtle and less dramatic. Green is outward-directed. She is not interested in herself and her internal drama. She is interested in St. Foy ("foy" means faith), the miracles she is said to have wrought after her persecution and martyrdom, and in the extraordinarily Byzantine decoration of the statue, covered in gold and jewels, with shards of the maiden's skull inside the statue's head.

She is also interested in the residents of the village, who believe with their whole heart in St. Foy's martyrdom and sainthood, and who live a life which, while stripped of any material advantage, seems almost heavenly. St. Foy scatters blessings where she lives, and Conques, Green comes to believe, is a sacred place. Green was happy in this village, happy with her work, her husband and her life, and the book is illuminated by that simple happiness. Besides, one is compelled to remind the reader, this was France and the food was good.

St. Foy was almost a teenager when she died, and in a gently hilarious chapter Green describes how through the ninth, 10th and 11th centuries, St. Foy appeared to woman after woman, demanding their jewellery; when finally the woman submitted -- some put up a fight -- the jewellery ended up on the statue, now so heavily weighted with gold and jewels it cannot be moved. This rings true. If I had been beheaded at 12, and my daddy had been rich, as St. Foy's was, I sure as heck would have appeared to everyone whose jewellery I coveted and demanded it to decorate my precious self.

There are thousands and thousands of stories to recount of the posthumous adventures of St. Foy, and Green does her best to layer these stories upon one another and contexualize them. Some are miraculous, some are intellectual history, some are folktales. But importantly, what we see most clearly in Little Saint is how life was lived when the veil between the worlds was thin, even transparent, and great feats could be performed by ordinary people of immense faith.

Green, without sentiment or bathos, shows us how that longing for perfection, and for the virtues embodied by St. Foy and all the other early Christian martyrs and saints, transform people who live bang up against brutality, starvation and repression. We who live in our safe material world miss the apparitions of the other world. We don't see the raven bringing a message from God, we don't believe in springs, "the water of which cures maladies of the eyes," and we don't feel the "primordial power -- like a voice with sound waves but no sound -- up through the stone of the mountain and the flagstones of the church into the very air of the sacred space." Green brings this world back to us, without insult or distress. With Little Saint , she has made us a fine parting gift. Elizabeth Nickson is the author of the novel The Monkey-Puzzle Tree .