Name Kathryn Hulme Role Author | Spouse Leonard Geldert (m. 1925) Movies The Nun's Story | |
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Born Kathryn Cavarly Hulme
July 6, 1900
San Francisco, California ( 1900-07-06 ) Died August 25, 1981, Lihue, Hawaii, United States Partner Marie Louise Habets (1905–1986) Books The Nun's Story, Undiscovered Country, Annie's Captain, Look a Lion in the Eye: On Safari Through Africa Similar People Robert Anderson, Fred Zinnemann, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Peter Finch | ||
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 misunderstood 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 along with Hulme and Gurdjieff.
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 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 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.