HULL, Helen (Rose)

Born 1888, Albion, Michigan; died 15 July 1971, New York, New York

Daughter of Warren C. and Louise McGill Hull

Born of teachers, Helen Hull spent an early smalltown Michigan life dominated by books and brothers. She attended Michigan State College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago, where she received a Ph.B. degree in 1912 and later did postgraduate work. Her subsequent teaching career included three years at Wellesley College, one at Barnard College, and 40 years at Columbia University, where she began as an extension teacher in 1916 and retired as emeritus professor of creative writing in 1956.

Hull did much of her novel writing during her summers in a renovated farmhouse, "Bayberry Farm," in the Blue Hill region of Maine. Her interests in flowers, boats, and dogs and her lack of interest in politics and publicity are reflected in her writing. She was active as teacher and creative writer in the literary currents of her time. At the time of her death, she had nearly finished her 21st novel.

Hull's 20 novels and two collections of short stories and novelettes (many of which appeared in popular magazines) explore in sensitive detail the ordinary, daily family and working-world relationships of children, parents, and spouses. Taken cumulatively, her novels are thematically Ibsenesque in exploring several sides to questions of marriage, divorce, remarriage, parenting, and career choices for women. Her first novel, Quest (1922), moves through the childhood and young adulthood of the daughter of an unhappily married college teacher, chronicling her discoveries in sex and in childbirth. Labyrinth (1923) depicts with understanding the lack of supportive models for a woman combining marriage, career, and parenthood. "My mind is coated with fat, my thoughts creek.… The loneliest person in the world is a devoted mother," laments an at-home Catherine. After she begins rewarding work, however, she is realistically faced with crises such as working when a child is sick.

In one of her best books, Islanders (1927), Hull recognizes the isolation to which women have been relegated through three generations and presents a strong alternative to being "enisled" in "the sea of life" in Ellen Dacey, whose fiancé left for the gold fields when she was 18, who farmed the land of her absent father for 18 years, who lost unexpected wealth to her brother, land to her father and brother. Finally, years later, having her nephew's daughter Anne to raise, she succeeds in breaking through Anne's mother's frail teaching, through finishing-school pretentions, to create in the young World War I suffragist a whole woman, capable of both essential love and essential independence.

The Asking Price (1930) presents the negative possibilities of a strong but misguided woman, who dominates, represses, and organizes her husband's life. Heat Lightning (1932), which gave Hull's readership a large boost by being chosen as a Book-of-the-Month, reaffirms the loving and independent female model in Grandmother Westover, who is able to reinspire a granddaughter fleeing from a disintegrating Eastern marriage. Moving from the Midwestern setting of this book to the New York apartment of the Prescotts in Hardy Perennial (1933), Hull presents a woman who is the strength during the Depression of those—sons, daughter, husband—who surround her in the impersonal man-made city.

Studies of various family relationships seem to culminate in The Hawk's Flight (1946), which looks at four kinds of marriages. Throughout, the background hero is Gilbert Moore, a psychiatrist who sees and brings out the best in other characters.

In departure from her previous work, A Tapping on the Wall (1960) and Close Her Pale Blue Eyes (1963) are entertaining, light, sophisticated mysteries. The former won the Dodd Mead Faculty Prize Mystery award.

One cannot but be impressed by Hull's literary productivity and her insight into human relationships. Emerging from her fiction, most of it favorably received, is a firm, healthy, and mature morality, unbuttressed by religious dogma or society's moral codes. It is a morality opposed to possessiveness, domineering, condemning, and lack of recognition of others' feelings, no matter where those negative qualities are found—in men, women, children, career women, housewives, professors, professor's wives, or novelists. Hull's books can lend wisdom to many everyday experiences.

Other Works:

The Surry Family (1925). Creative Writing (with M. L. Robinson, 1932). Morning Shows the Day (1934). The Art of Writing Prose (with R. S. Loomis and M. L. Robinson, 1936). Candle Indoors (1936). Uncommon People (1936). Frost Flower (1939). Experiment: Four Short Novels (1940). Through the House Door (1940). A Circle in the Water (English title, Darkening Hill, 1943). Mayling Soong Chiang (1943). Octave (1947). The Writer's Book (1950). Landfall (1953). Wind Rose (1958).

Bibliography:

Overton, G. M., Women Who Make Our Novels (1931).

Reference works:

American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1972). CB (May 1940, 1971). TCA. TCAS. Other references: Bookman (May 1932). NYT (17 July 1971). Saturday Evening Post (1 June 1935). WLB (Oct. 1930).

—CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER