Kathryn Hulme


Kathryn Hulme 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 women known as "The Rope," which included eight members in all: Jane Heap,, 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 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.
In her 1938 fictionalized autobiography We Lived as Children, Hulme describes a child's perspective of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.