A short life of the author
Kathryn Cavarly Hulme (6 January 1900 – 25 August 1981) was an American writer whose single most famous book — The Nun’s Story (1956) — was one of the biggest bestsellers of the 1950s, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film (1959) directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Audrey Hepburn in what many consider her finest dramatic performance. But Hulme’s own life was in many ways more extraordinary than the story she told: she was a student of the mystic George Gurdjieff, a relief worker in displaced persons camps in postwar Germany, and the lifelong companion of Marie Louise Habets, the former nun whose story she fictionalised.
Life
Hulme was born in San Francisco and grew up in California. She studied at Hunter College in New York and worked as a journalist and factory worker in the 1920s and 1930s. In the mid-1930s, she became a student of George Gurdjieff, the Russian-Armenian spiritual teacher whose system of self-development attracted a circle of devoted followers in Paris and New York. Hulme studied with Gurdjieff for several years and later wrote about the experience in Undiscovered Country (1966), a memoir that is one of the most thoughtful accounts of Gurdjieff’s teaching written by a participant.
During World War II, Hulme served with the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) as a deputy director of a displaced persons camp in Wildflecken, Bavaria. Her memoir of this experience, The Wild Place (1953), describes the chaos, desperation, and moral complexity of managing a camp of thousands of displaced persons — Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic — in the immediate aftermath of the war. The book is a vivid and unsentimental account of one of the great humanitarian crises of the twentieth century.
It was at Wildflecken that Hulme met Marie Louise Habets, a Belgian nurse and former nun who had left her convent after years of internal struggle. Habets and Hulme became lifelong companions — the nature of their relationship was romantic, though the conventions of the era prevented explicit acknowledgment.
The Nun’s Story (1956)
Hulme’s masterwork is a biographical novel based on Marie Louise Habets’s life as a member of a Belgian religious order. The novel follows Sister Luke (the fictional name for Habets) from her entry into the convent through her years of religious training, her posting as a nurse in the Belgian Congo, and her eventual decision to leave the order.
The novel’s power comes from its unflinching portrayal of the conflict between individual conscience and institutional obedience. Sister Luke is intelligent, capable, and genuinely devout, but she is also proud, independent, and unable to surrender her will completely to the rule of obedience — the central requirement of her order. The convent’s demand for total submission of the self is depicted with extraordinary psychological precision: not as cruelty, but as a spiritual discipline that some personalities simply cannot survive.
The Fred Zinnemann film (1959) was a critical and commercial success. Audrey Hepburn’s performance — restrained, intelligent, deeply felt — is widely considered the best of her career and was nominated for the Academy Award. The film was shot partly in Belgium and partly in the Congo and is one of the finest screen adaptations of a novel from the period.
Other Works
The Wild Place (1953) is Hulme’s most underrated book — a memoir of the displaced persons camps that deserves comparison to the best postwar reportage. Undiscovered Country (1966) is her account of studying with Gurdjieff in the 1930s and 1940s — a book valued by scholars of the Gurdjieff movement for its honesty and intelligence. Annie’s Captain (1961) is a novel about a nineteenth-century sea captain’s wife.
Collecting Hulme
The Nun’s Story (1956, Atlantic-Little, Brown) in first edition with dust jacket brings $30–$80. The Wild Place (1953) brings $20–$50. Undiscovered Country (1966) is the scarcest of her books in first edition and is sought by collectors of Gurdjieff-related material. Signed copies of any Hulme work are uncommon.