Kathryn Hulme | |
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| Born | Kathryn Cavarly Hulme July 6, 1900 San Francisco, California |
| Died | August 25, 1981 (aged 81) Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii |
| Spouse | Leonard D. Geldert (1925–1928) |
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.
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.
