The sensuous is her window on the world; sexuality is the sea for all her voyages.

The New York Times

Maude Hutchins

Maude Phelps Hutchins (1899–1992) was born in New York but brought up on Long Island. “After graduation from Yale University where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree she pursued a talent for drawing by studying in an art school and in a number of one-man exhibitions in galleries and museums across the country attaining a considerable reputation as a sculptress. Despite her activities along these lines and her role as the mother of three daughters a deep urge for writing persisted and Mrs. Hutchins began publishing short stories poems and plays-for-reading in various literary magazines. Her first novel Georgiana appeared in 1948 and had immediate critical success. Her second novel A Diary of Love was threatened with banning in Chicago but the municipal authorities retreated when the American Civil Liberties Union and leading literary figures came to the book’s defense. Following these novels a collection of short stories and plays-for-reading (Love is a Pie) and a third novel (My Hero) were published by New Directions.

cover image of the book My Hero

My Hero

Early in this delectable new novel by the author of A Diary of Love the narrator reads some notes that outline the life of her hero, Steve: “From innocence to carnal knowledge, to ideal love, to reality, to his code of behavior, ’I harm no one, so it’s not bad’.” And the reader enjoys the progress of this healthy young animal, who achieves a kind of “divine proportion” in spirit as well as body. From Steve’s first wrestle with fear tied to a pole as a train rushes by, from his first kiss, at six, with a girl named Ginger, to less innocent loves with an older girl and a fellow student, to a knowledge of his father’s wild anger and the hateful scheming of his best girl’s mother, to encounters with prostitutes and gunmen in Chicago, he goes his difficult way toward maturity and the woman who tells the story.

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cover image of the book Georgiana

Georgiana

Georgiana is a girl. The printer who printed her thought she was quite a girl, and we readily agree. But don’t interpret “quite” to mean “bad.” A girl with as much brain and flair as Georgiana doesn’t have to be bad to make her appealing. You read a few pages of Georgiana at random—her childhood or her days in school or her first loves—and you realize at once that she is a real person. So indeed that she breaks all the roles of novel-writing. In fact she walks clean out of the back cover. Nobody is going to finish her. Perhaps good sculptors cannot be trusted with typewriters. They see too much and they feel too much. You will, too.

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cover image of the book A Diary of Love

A Diary of Love

In A Diary of Love, Maude Hutchins introduces us to Noel. Noel is an orphan being raised by a flute-playing grandfather, a spinster aunt, a benign family doctor, an incredible cook, an improbable governess, and the neighbors, who are gamey. Between a country estate and a sanitarium in the desert, A Diary of Love highlights the capriciousness of Noel and her capability to love a vast array of characters. Hutchins’ probing, darting, fantasy-building mind is ever on the move through space, time, history, dreams, and delighted memories.

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cover image of the book Love Is A Pie

Love Is A Pie

In Love is a Pie, Maude Hutchins serves up what is surely one of the most extraordinary pastries ever baked in a literary oven. Its ingedients range from the small angel Astrolabe, to Toto the gorilla, from an impudently portrayed Julius Caeser to the newest wife of the founder of the Mormon church. There is the curious history of why mannequins do not speak. In a group of five stories—“The Lost Papers of an Extra Man”—one learns what goes on in a bachelor’s mind and heart, and at the dinner parties where he tends to lose both. In every piece within Love is a Pie there is the inimitable Hutchins style, her fresh and original way of looking at familiar matters, her piquant wit.

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The sensuous is her window on the world; sexuality is the sea for all her voyages.

The New York Times

Stories, confessions and plays-for-readings are baked together in this spiced vol-au-vent….Literary loop-the-loops that show off Mrs. Hutchins talents at their feathery, post-Freudian best.

The New York Times

Georgiana is illumined at moments with the color, line and sound of rounded artistic genius.

Chicago Tribune
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