Magdalene of St Joseph was born in Paris, to a Turonese family, on May 17, 1578, the sixth of fifteen children. She grew up in Paris and Tours, where, in 1603, she met Pierre de Bérulle who wanted and was about to introduce the Teresian Carmel into France.

Overcome by the ideal proposed by the future cardinal, she decided to enter the Discalced Carmelites. In Paris, in July 1604, she joined the group that, under the leadership of Barbe Acarie (the future Bl. Mary of the Incarnation), was preparing to enter the Teresian Carmel.

On October 17, 1604, when the first Discalced Carmelites arrived from Spain, Magdalene with her companions entered the specially erected monastery of the Incarnation of Paris, where on November 12, 1605, she was the first professed. The following day, Bl Anna di St Bartholomew, companion and confidant of St. Teresa, appointed the young religious as teacher of the novices, a position that she held for two and a half years, shaping the first generation of French Discalced Carmelite nuns, who then had to spread the Teresian flame throughout the nation, always supported by the prayer, advice, and prudence of Magdalene.

On 20 April 1608, she was elected Prioress, immediately proving to be spiritually and apostolically mature in the government of her religious and in the irradiation of the Teresian ideal. Re-elected in 1611, she remained in the monastery until March 1615. In July of that year she was sent to Tours to help the prioress of that monastery (founded by Magdalene's father), who was poorly prepared for directing a monastery. After a brief stop in Paris (March-July 1616), on 8^th of July 1616 she founded the monastery of Lyon and on 7^th of September 1617 another monastery, "Mother of God", in Paris, bringing with her Catherine of Jesus (d. 1623), a distinguished mystic of whom she was the confidant, the guide and, after her death, the biographer, at the request of Queen Maria de' Medici.

In 1624 she was recalled to the monastery of the Incarnation in Paris and was re-elected prioress, remaining in this office until 1635.

She died in Paris, in the first monastery of the Incarnation, on April 30, 1637.

On July 16, 1789, the decree on her heroic virtue was promulgated.