Kathryn Hulme

• Name — Kathryn Hulme • Born — 6 July 1900 • Birthplace — San Francisco, California • Died — 25 August 1981 • Place of death — Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii • Birth Name — Kathryn Cavarly Hulme • Spouse — Leonard D. Geldert (1925–1928)

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. In her 1938 fictionalized autobiography We Lived as Children, Hulme describes a child's perspective of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.