Kathryn Cavarly Hulme (January 6, 1900 – August 25, 1981) was an American novelist and memoirist.
Writing Hulme is known for her best-selling 1956 novel The Nun's Story, which was adapted into an award-winning 1959 film directed by Fred Zinneman and starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch. The novel is commonly misunderstood to be semi-autobiographical.
Hulme is also the author of the 1953 memoir 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.
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.
Another work, the 1967 memoir The Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure, 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.The Rope gurdjieff-legacy.org. 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, () 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) () Look a Lion in the Eye: On Safari Through Africa, Little, Brown & Co. First edition (1974) () 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
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.