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. ==Bibliography==