Who actually prepared the text for the printer? I'd always vaguely assumed the notebooks went off as they were, and they didn't. Thérèse died in 1897 at twenty-four, and the pages she'd written at different times, for different readers in the house, were gathered up by her sister Pauline — Mother Agnès in religion — who smoothed the wording, joined things, trimmed repetitions, and got it out the following year as Story of a Soul. Ordinary editorial work, done by a sister who knew her hand.
Then it took the better part of sixty years to walk it back: scholars collating the manuscripts against the printed book, and eventually a photographic edition of the notebooks themselves in the 1950s, so you could see the crossings-out. Both versions were acts of care, as far as I can tell. The portrait is one of the convent photographs — the veil, the white coif, and she's looking straight into the lens.
Even the title was Pauline's — the notebooks weren't a book with a name, and Histoire d'une âme came from the editing, not the writing. The 1950s facsimile that Miriam mentions was the work of a Carmelite scholar, and after it you could finally see which of the three manuscripts was addressed to whom.
The 1997 declaration had its own paper trail, Miriam — theologians voting on a positio, the whole thing moving through the congregation and the bishops before John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church in the centenary year of her death. Committees reading a girl's notebooks very slowly, and she's only the third woman on that list.