Kathryn Hulme

American novelist

Kathryn Hulme (January 6, 1900 – August 25, 1981) was an American author and memoirist most noted for her novel The Nun's Story. The book is often misunderstood to be semi-autobiographical.

Writing

Her 1956 book The Nun's Story was a best-selling novel which was made into an award-winning 1959 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch.

Another work, The Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure published by Little, Brown & Co. was a description of her years as a student of mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and her eventual conversion to Catholicism. Hulme studied with Gurdjieff as part of a group of eight women known as "The Rope," which included: Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Alice Rohrer, Elizabeth Gordon, Louise Davidson, Georgette Leblanc, Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap^[1]

She is also the author of The Wild Place, a vivid description of her experiences as the UNRRA Director of the Polish Displaced Persons camp at Wildflecken, Germany, after World War II. This work won the Atlantic Non-Fiction Award in 1952.^[2]

It was at Wildflecken that Hulme met a Belgian nurse and former nun Marie Louise Habets, who became her lifelong companion. The Nun's Story is a slightly fictionalized biographical account of Habets' life as a nun.

In her 1938 fictionalized autobiography We Lived as Children, Hulme describes a child's perspective of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

Bibliography

• Arab Interlude, Macrae Smith Company (Philadelphia), 1930
• Desert Night, The Macauley Company (New York), 1932
• We lived as children, A.A. Knopf (New York, London), 1938 (LCCN: 38027542, ASIN: B000GBZZIU)
• The Wild Place, (Atlantic Prize for Nonfiction (1952), Brown Little, 1953, (ISBN 9787100102407)
• The Nun's Story, Pocket Books, 1958 (ASIN: B000CBFXYA)
• The Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure, Little, Brown & Co. (Boston USA/Toronto CA), 1967; reprinted (Natural Bridge Editions: Lexington MA, 1997) (ISBN 1-891218-03-4)
• Look A Lion In the Eye: On Safari Through Africa, Little, Brown & Co. First edition (1974) (ISBN 0316381403)
• Annie's Captain, Little, Brown and Company (Boston, Toronto), 1961

See also

• Margaret Caroline Anderson
• Monica Baldwin
• G. I. Gurdjieff
• Marie Louise Habets
• Jane Heap
• Solita Solano

References

1. The Rope Archived 2006-06-16 at the Wayback Machine gurdjieff-legacy.org.
2. Campbell, Debra (Winter 2008). "[About the Cover]: The Nun's Story: Another Look at the Postwar Religious Revival". American Catholic Studies. 119 (4): 103–108. JSTOR 44195197. Retrieved 10 February 2023.

External links

• Kathryn Hulme Papers Digital collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• Kathryn Hulme Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• "Too Much to Watch," short radio segment from We Lived as Children at California Legacy Project.

^[1]

1. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/hulme-kathryn-1900-1981