Undiscovered country, Kathryn Hulme

Undiscovered country, a spiritual adventure, Kathryn Hulme

Kathryn Hulme was born a resourceful Californian with a secret ambition to write. In this impelling autobiography she records her trials and successes as a writer but, more important, she movingly describes the source of her spiritual strength. "In the Paris of the thirties the great adventure of my life began." As companion and guide of a wealthy milliner she made her second trip abroad. It was in Paris that her life changed. Her entire outlook and self-appraisal was destroyed and reshaped under the guidance of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff. Over months and months of merciless probing, he found the weak spots in her armor and laid bare her inner confusion. Sustained by his magnetism and teaching she began to find herself. She wrote and published her first books, and with Gurdjieff's words to guide her she built up within herself a confidence and fortitude she had never had before. Gurdjieff's presence is felt throughout the book as Miss Hulme, again and again, returns to his words, his admonitions, his warnings of the pitfalls which would plague her throughout her life. With the approach of the war this spiritual autobiography shows how her strength was tested for two years as a welder in the Kaiser shipyards, and then for five years in the exhausting and compassionate work which she did as a top administrator in UNRAA, striving to give fresh life and hope to the Poles and Hungarians who were freed from slave-labor camps after the German surrender.

It was during these years that she met the quiet Belgian nurse whose agonized past became the inspiration for her great novel The Nun's Story. Their close friendship was a relief and a solace to both as they dealt with thousands upon thousands of homeless, war-weary refugees during those chaotic years following World War II. From this friendship and the long years of spiritual searching came her conversion to Catholicism. This is not merely the autobiography of a world-renowned author; it is the long, arduous journey of a soul "hungry for something more" 

Details

• First Edition 1966
• Hardcover with dust jacket (Very Good) 
• ISBN: 9780955909085
• Condition: Very Good
  
• Publisher: The Atlantic Monthly Press