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Helen Rose Hull
(March 28, 1888 - July 15, 1971) U.S.A.

Helen Rose Hull

Writer, teacher

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Helen Rose Hull was born in Albion, Michigan, as the eldest child of her family to Warren C. and Louise Hull. Her father, was a former teacher and school superintendent of the Albion Public Schools from 1887 to 1898. At a young age, Helen and her brother became financially responsible for their family. Helen went to Lansing High School.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.

When she went to Wellesley College to teach creative writing, she met Mabel Louise Robinson, with whom she lived for the rest of her life; their home was in New York and, in summer, in North Brooklin, Maine.

In 1914, she began her career as a writer, which lasted for over fifty years. Her first published piece was a one-act play in the suffrage magazine, The Woman's Journal . Throughout her career, Hull managed to publish seventeen novels and sixty-five short stories. Her short stories appeared in more than fourteen different American magazines. The topic of her writing included familial relationships, gender differences, and social issues, including race and women's economic status.

Despite being involved in radical politics early in life, Hull mainly addressed issues through the stories of her characters. It is speculated that her decreased involvement in the political scene was due to her publisher's concern that Hull's lesbianism would be "detrimental to her career".

Hull died in New York City at the age of 83. At the time of her death, she had nearly finished her 21st novel.

Hull's first novel, Quest , received generally positive reviews upon its publication in 1922. Another one of her notable novels, Islanders , was published in 1927 and is set in the Midwest during the mid-19th century to World War I. It tells the story of a single woman who has to take care of her parents, her siblings, and her siblings' children. Through the growth of this intelligent and inventive woman, Hull poses important questions about the role of a woman during this time period.

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.

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Sources: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia & http://www.encyclopedia.com/ & https://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/

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