Sydney, 1913. A young woman lies bedridden in a rented house in Coogee, her spine ravaged by tuberculosis, her body barely three foot ten.
By every conventional measure, Eileen O'Connor has nothing — no institutional power, no official standing, no physical strength to speak of. And yet, from her bed, with little more than a telephone and an extraordinary force of will, she is about to change the lives of thousands.
Eileen O'Connor founded Our Lady's Nurses of the Poor — known as the Brown Nurses — to provide free nursing care to Sydney's sick poor in their own homes. She negotiated with doctors, charmed benefactors, organised rosters and managed a growing organisation, all while enduring pain most of us cannot imagine.
When the Catholic Church hierarchy moved to shut her order down, she didn't capitulate. She boarded a wartime troop ship — in constant pain, sailing through seas made dangerous by the First World War — and took her case directly to the Vatican in Rome. She won.
Eileen O'Connor died in 1921, aged just twenty-eight. More than a century later, her cause for sainthood is under active investigation by the Vatican. She may yet become Australia's second saint, after Mary MacKillop.
Every Inch a Saint weaves Eileen's remarkable true story with a fictional narrative following an Australian family across generations — tracing the long, quiet shadow of war trauma from the battlefields of WWI through to the present day. It is at once a historical novel, a story of faith and medicine, and a meditation on what it means to find purpose through suffering.
The novel is the debut work of Adelaide author Kate Clinch, a former GP whose own life took an unexpected turn when she discovered Eileen O'Connor during a Sydney holiday in 2018. What began as curiosity became devotion — and then, during Kate's own cancer diagnosis and recovery, something closer to a lifeline.
She rewrote the novel during chemotherapy, finding in Eileen's patience and surrender a model for her own. The manuscript found its home with Monkfish Books in the United States — a connection made, fittingly, through an online prayer circle Kate had joined during treatment.
Kate brings to the novel a rare combination: the clinical precision of a medical background, deep archival research into WWI and early twentieth-century Sydney, and a profound personal investment in her subject. She had access to Eileen's X-rays. She walked the streets where Eileen had lived. She was guided, she believes, every step of the way.
Every Inch a Saint is a story about the kind of power that doesn't announce itself — and the women who wield it anyway.
Disability Themes
Historical, Mysticism, Faith, Miracles
About The Author
Born in England, Kate Clinch has lived in Australia since she was six.
After a near death experience, she left her general medical practice and began researching and writing about spiritual matters —especially mysterious soul connections and miraculous healings. She’s co-authored research papers as a doctor.
In the 1990s she wrote regular columns on garden history for Australian Doctor magazine, and in the 2000s on homeschooling for Education Choices magazine.
Her unpublished first novel was long listed in Australia for the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. In 2020, after meeting Eileen O’Connor’s nuns to discuss Every Inch a Saint, she wrote them a medical report to support the investigation into her sainthood.
She lives in Adelaide with her two young adult children—who happily have survived many experiments in home education—a neurotic German Shepherd, a surfeit of bantam chickens, and an occasional visiting kangaroo.
