Wind rose.

by Helen R. Hull

A summer hotel on the Maine coast is the setting for this tale involving a domineering woman writer and several troubled romances.

Paperback

About the author

Helen Rose Hull was brought up in Michigan, the eldest child of a schools superintendent and a former teacher. Early on she and her brother became financially responsible for their family.

She went to Lansing High School and Michigan State University and was a schoolteacher; after graduate work she went to Wellesley College to teach creative writing. Here 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.

She joined the Department of English at Columbia in 1916 and taught there for the next forty years, becoming professor. In New York she was a key member of the Heterodoxy Club, a group of outstanding and unorthodox women. She published numerous short stories and the first of her 17 novels came out in 1922, the last in 1963.

- from the back cover of 'Heat Lightning' published by Persephone Books

Reviews

[Marta E C R · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. This book sat on my shelves for years, and was finally read during an ongoing project to read and give away books. Published in 1958, it is dated, yet the stories told here about the people at a coastal inn in Maine could be written in an almost similar fashion today. People are people, embroiled in their own needs and desires, and this novel gives us the story of a number of those people circling around the grande dame, novelist and widow Mrs. Margaret Bartholomew, who is back at the inn after some years away, along with her hired companion, Kristine with her young son Jimmy, trying to sort out the complexities of her own marriage. The lives of many of the inn’s workers are fleshed out as well. The title reference doesn’t come until page 305 of 310. I hope someone else will eventually also appreciate this old novel that still has so many pertinent themes.