|
Marie Louise Habets (January 1905-May 1986) was a Belgian nurse and former religious sister whose life was fictionalised as Sister Luke (Gabrielle van der Mal) in ''The Nun's Story'', a bestselling 1956 book by American author Kathryn Hulme. The Belgian-born actress Audrey Hepburn portrayed Gabrielle van der Mal in the 1959 Fred Zinnemann film ''The Nun's Story'', and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. ==Early life== Habets was born in the town of Egem in West Flanders during January 1905, and in 1926 entered the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, an enclosed religious order, which cared for the sick and poor within their cloister. She was admitted at their convent on Molenaarstraat in Ghent, and then took the name Sister Xaverine. In 1933 she was sent to the mission hospital her congregation staffed for the Belgian government in the Belgian Congo. She returned to Belgium during the summer of 1939 due to her having contracted tuberculosis, shortly before the Nazi invasion of her country that September at the start of World War II. Her father was killed shortly after this. Sister Xaverine developed such a hatred toward Germans that she became involved with the Belgian Resistance. She came to feel that she could not obey the dictates of her faith for forgiveness and applied to the Holy See for a dispensation from her religious vows, a very rare request in that era. She was eventually granted this and left the congregation on 16 August 1944 from their convent in Uccle.〔(Rhoenline.com "Marie Louise Habets" )〕 Habets settled in Antwerp, which was liberated by Allied forces a few weeks later. She joined a British First Aid unit which nursed the soldiers wounded while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. She was present in Antwerp when German forces massively bombarded the city soon after its liberation, killing and maiming some ten thousand people. After the end of the war in Europe, she was sent to Germany to help care for her fellow Belgians who had been imprisoned in concentration camps there.〔 Hulme’s 1966 autobiography ''Undiscovered Country'' describes Hulme and Habets’ first meeting in 1945. Both were volunteers with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an international project working to resettle refugees and others displaced by the war. Hulme recounts that, at a training camp in northern France, she became aware of a Belgian female colleague who spent most of her time asleep. Even when awake, the woman, a nurse, was taciturn, solitary and preoccupied, almost antisocial. In time, however, the Belgian nurse revealed herself as a diligent worker, a good friend, and a woman with a secret: she had just left the convent after 17 years of struggle with her vows. She felt burdened and depressed by a deep sense of failure. Zoe Fairbairns’ article ''The Nun’s True Story'' and Fairbairns’ radio play ''The Belgian Nurse'', broadcast in 2007 on the BBC, tell the story of how Habets’s story became Hulme’s bestseller and how the two women became partners and shared a home and a life for nearly 40 years.〔(''The Tablet'', Jan 6 2007, "The Nun's True Story", Zoe Fairbairns )〕〔(BBC Radio Four,''The Belgian Nurse'', Zoe Fairbairns Jan 13 2007 )〕 Their parallel lives are explored in ''The Nun and the Crocodile: the Stories within The Nun's Story'', a paper given by Debra Campbell at the Women and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting on November 21, 2004. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Marie Louise Habets」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|