This volume presents forty-one of the eighty-one existing full-length letters from the celebrated Ursuline nun and mystic Marie [Guyart] de l'Incarnation (1599–1672) to the son whom she had abandoned when he was just eleven in order to enter religious life. Spanning the period between 1640 and 1670, the letters are written from Québec, where Marie helped found the first Ursuline convent in the New World. As such, they offer valuable insights into the difficulties of life in this young colony, as well as a rich picture of Marie's interior life, which she communicated to her son, after repeated requests and following his own religious vows as a Benedictine monk. Taken together, the letters read as a kind of extended apology for the abandonment, which, Marie stresses, caused prolonged distress to her as well as him. The letters reveal the intensity of Marie's religious vocation – the desire to lose herself in the ‘celestial spouse’ (p. 51) to whom she felt called – and tell something of her devotional practices and the graces with which she was rewarded, while revealing also her humility and sense of inadequacy and sin. Dunn's translation is fluid and engaging; her introduction establishes the biographical and spiritual context for the letters well. The notes do an excellent job of identifying the spiritual currents reflected in Marie's mystical piety. They are less comprehensive where events mentioned in the letters are concerned, most often simply referring the reader to the relevant passage in the Jesuit relations.