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.