Maude Hutchins

Maude Hutchins (4 Feb 1899 – 28 March 1991) was an American artist, sculptor, and novelist.

Early life and education Maude Hutchins was born Maude Phelps McVeigh on February 4, 1899, in Guilford, New York. She was the daughter of Warren Ratcliff McVeigh, an editor at the New York Sun, and Maude Louise Phelps. She had an older sister, Frances Ratcliffe McVeigh.

Maude and her sister were orphaned at a young age and lived with their grandparents in Bayshore on Long Island. Also living with them was their wealthy aunt, Carlonia Thompson (a prominent member of Long Island society), and her husband and children. By 1920, Maude was living solely with her aunt and one of her cousins.

On September 10, 1921, Maude married Robert Maynard Hutchins, who went on to become University of Chicago president. Previously, Mr. Hutchins was on the faculty of Yale University which is how he met Maude.

Maude attended St. Margaret's School in Waterbury, Connecticut and then received her B.F.A from the Yale School of Fine Arts, completing her five-year degree in only three and a half. She won several awards, including the Warren Whitney Memorial Prize for heroic figure at the Beaux Arts in New York. She graduated in 1926, but remained at Yale for two years after, during which time she executed a number of portraits and did other professional work.

Career Hutchins became a professional artist in 1924. She had her first art show at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York City. A drawing from her 1932 work, Diagrammatics, which she co-published with Mortimer J. Adler, was enlarged and displayed as a mural in the Hall of Science at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois. Her first novel Georgiana appeared in 1948 and had immediate critical success. This novel also began her reputation as an author who did not shy away from 'taboo' topics, namely sex and lesbianism. Georgiana is set in a girls' school, and the main character blames her problems in life on her "lesbian complex." Her second novel A Diary of Love (1950) was threatened with banning in Chicago, but the municipal authorities retreated when the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading literary figures came to the book's defense.

Anaïs Nin considered Hutchins one of the foremost practitioners of the "new novel" in the English language. Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine, The novel focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl, Victorine, as she discovers her sexuality and place in the world. It was reviewed to be "a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick". She wrote several other novels, short stories, and collections of poetry as well.

Marriage, controversies, and death During her marriage with Robert Hutchins, the couple had three children: Frances Ratcliffe (Franja), Joanna Blessing, and Clarissa Phelps. and then to Chicago in 1930. The couple was said to be as glamorous and beautiful as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but in reality, their 27-year marriage was a union made in hell. Many take the side of her husband, placing the responsibility on Maude, because of how influential Robert was in academia. Milton Mayer wrote in 1993 that Mr. Hutchins was forced to spend nearly thirty years in an ‘isolated hell’, struggling to ‘keep Maude quiet’. Terry Castle describes Maude in the marriage as thus: "[Maude] had no interest in the “parochial stuffiness” of academia, one says, and refused to entertain university dignitaries. Whenever “poor Bob” had to attend a presidential function, another says, Maude would throw a “window-rattling tantrum” and threaten to “blow the roof off.” She was “extravagant”, “selfish” and “constitutionally uninterested in most of mankind.”