Kathryn Hulme

Kathryn Hulme
File:Kathryn hulme ca 1920.jpg
Born	Kathryn Cavarly Hulme (1900-07-06)July 6, 1900 San Francisco, California
Died	Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii
Spouse	Leonard D. Geldert (1925–1928)
Partner	Marie Louise Habets (1905–1986)

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

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 women known as "The Rope", which included eight members in all: Jane Heap, Elizabeth Gordon, Solita Solano, Margaret Caroline Anderson, Louise Davidson and Alice Rohrer, besides them.

She is also the author of Wild Place, a description of her experiences as the UNRRA Director of the Polish Displaced Persons (DP) camp at Wildflecken, Germany, after WWII. This work won the Atlantic Non-Fiction Award in 1952.

It was at Wildflecken that Hulme met a Belgian nurse and former nun named 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 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)

See also

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

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.
• Works by or about Kathryn Hulme in libraries (WorldCat catalog)