Betty Hester
Birth dateJune 1, 1923
Birth placeRome, Georgia, U.S.
Death dateDecember 26, 1998 (aged 75)
Death placeAtlanta, Georgia, U.S.
OccupationAmerican correspondent

Hazel Elizabeth Hester (June 1, 1923 – December 26, 1998)[1] was an American correspondent of influential twentieth-century writers, including Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch.[2] Hester wrote several short stories, poems, diaries, and philosophical essays, none of which were published.[3]

Life

Hester was born in Rome, Georgia, and attended Young Harris College.[2] She lived and worked in Atlanta before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1948.[4] After five years in the service she had risen to the rank of technical sergeant[4] and was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany, after World War II (c. 1948–53).[4] She was discharged as "undesirable" for being a lesbian.[4] After her discharge from the Air Force,[5] she returned to Georgia.[4] Hester spent most of her life in a small Midtown Atlanta apartment.[3] She worked for an Atlanta-based retail credit company (Equifax), commuting every day by bus.[2][4] She struggled with alcoholism and bouts of depression[4] but kept her sexual orientation a secret except to her closest friends.[4]

Hester is best known for her nine-year correspondence and friendship with Southern fiction writer Flannery O'Connor.[5] From 1955 to 1964, Hester and O'Connor exchanged nearly 300 letters, some of which are published in Sally Fitzgerald's 1979 compilation of O'Connor's correspondence, The Habit of Being.[3] Hester, a very private and reclusive woman, asked that her identity be kept secret in the published letters; thus, she appears as "A".[3][6]

Hester first wrote to O'Connor in July 1955,[7] when O'Connor was working on her second novel, The Violent Bear it Away.[8][3] Eager to exchange thoughts and ideas with someone of equal intellectual caliber, O'Connor wrote back: "I would like to know who this is who understands my stories."[7] O'Connor felt that she and Hester shared a spiritual kinship,[7] and O'Connor would later become Hester's confirmation sponsor in the Catholic Church.[9] Hester left the Church in 1961[10] and turned to agnosticism.[citation needed] This news was a grave disappointment for O'Connor,[11] who had engaged Hester in theological dialogues and tried to sustain her friend's faith.[citation needed]

Death and legacy

Hester gave her letters to Emory University in 1987 on the condition that they be sealed for twenty years.[3] They were released to the public on May 12, 2007.[2]

Like her mother, Hester died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on December 26, 1998, in Atlanta, at the age of 75.[4]

Notes

  1. ^ U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936–2007.
  2. ^ Tagami, Kirsten (May 10, 2007). "Flannery O'Connor Letters Going Public". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Archived from the original on May 15, 2007.
  3. ^ Young, Alec T. (Autumn 2007). "Flannery's Friend: Emory Unseals Letters from O'Connor to Longtime Correspondent Betty Hester". Emory Magazine. Archived September 26, 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 15, 2016.
  4. ^ Köhler, Nicholas (May 10, 2016). "The Mysterious Letter Writer Who Beguiled Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch". The New Yorker. Archived May 12, 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ^ Enniss, Steve (May 12, 2007). "Flannery O'Connor's Private Life Revealed in Letters". National Public Radio. Archived May 9, 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 13, 2016.
  6. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 89.
  7. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 90.
  8. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 315.
  9. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 154.
  10. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 451.
  11. ^ O'Connor 1979, p. 451: "I don't know anything that could grieve us here like this news. I know that what you do you do because you think it is right, and I don't think any the less of you outside the Church than in it, but what is painful is the realization that this means a narrowing of life for you and a lessening of the desire for life."

Works cited

Further reading