Hazel Elizabeth Hester, called Betty by friends and pen pals, carried on a lengthy correspondence with both Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch.  Photograph Courtesy Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

In 1974, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote to her friend Naomi Lebowitz, a professor of English and comparative literature at Washington University, in St. Louis, to ask, “what am I supposed to think about Flannery O’Connor?”  The Southern writer had been mentioned, Murdoch told Lebowitz, by her “mad fan in Atlanta Georgia.”  Murdoch initially thought that the reference was to Flann O’Brien. “ The one was female, the other male, but who cares these days?”  she added.  The fan had sent her O’Connor’s complete stories, but Murdoch was unimpressed. “ I read one or two and thought them very accomplished but was not really moved,” she wrote. “ Should I persevere, is she very good?” 

Murdoch does not appear to have realized just how close her fan in Atlanta had been to O’Connor—even though, by then, she and this fan had been corresponding for a decade or more.  She had described the fan to Lebowitz as “dotty” and “a tiny bit crazy,” but, nonetheless, Murdoch continued exchanging letters with her, as is made plain in the book “Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995,” published by Princeton University Press earlier this year. “ Did I tell you my crazy Atlanta fan has surfaced again?”  Murdoch wrote Lebowitz, in 1983. “ She has started ringing me up at 3 a.m. Atlanta, 8 a.m. here (I’m glad it’s not the other way round).  Yesterday she said would I please have a blood test to determine whether I am male or female? ( She thinks I am male, only no one knows this but her.)”  Murdoch continued, “In spite of such delusions she managed, till lately retiring, to hold down a regular job in an insurance office.” 

There is no doubt that this was Hazel Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk at Atlanta’s Retail Credit Company, now the credit-reporting giant Equifax.  Murdoch and Hester, who called herself Betty, corresponded for more than thirty years, until the onset of Alzheimer’s disease made it impossible for Murdoch to reply.  Even then, John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband, asked Hester to continue. “ She loves hearing from you,” Bayley wrote Hester in January, 1997, “and she sends loving greeting.  Please go on writing to her because it means a lot to her—a really very great deal.” 

That Murdoch corresponded for decades with an Atlanta file clerk is not entirely surprising: Murdoch replied to everyone, and spent up to four hours a day on correspondence. (“ I have had a letter from an electronics engineer (male) in Walsall who changes his clothes every evening and becomes Hilda,” she wrote her longtime lover, the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy, in 1969. “ He seems to think I should do something about it.  Have written him a relaxed letter.”)  But Hester also happened to be the correspondent known only as “A” in “The Habit of Being,” Flannery O’Connor’s collected letters, published in 1979.  O’Connor’s letters have been described as the twentieth century’s answer to the letters of John Keats, and Hester, the mad fan, is now widely considered her most important correspondent. 

Hester first wrote O’Connor in July, 1955, to object to a review in The New Yorker of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s first collection of stories.  After taking issue with the review, Hester asked O’Connor whether the stories weren’t actually “about God.”  O’Connor said they were, then added, “I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.” 

After “The Habit of Being” was published, many others wanted to know, too: over their nine-year correspondence, O’Connor revealed more about herself and her religious and creative life to “A” than to anyone.  But it was not until Hester sat in a chair in her home in late 1998 and shot herself in the head, at the age of seventy-five, that her identity became public. “ Letters to Betty Hester, 1955–1964,” a collection of roughly two hundred and fifty letters from O’Connor, is today available for viewing at Emory University.  None of Hester’s letters to O’Connor survive; nor do any of those she sent Murdoch.  Hester therefore remains an enigma—“a clerk out of Kafka, living a secret life of the mind,” as the Catholic writer and critic Paul Elie has written.  She was also a lesbian, and the dilemma of being gay in the South in the nineteen-fifties likely played a role in how assiduously she guarded her privacy. 

But the mystery surrounding Hester is now eroding.  Last year, a detailed military file stemming from her time in the U.S. Air Force became available from the National Archives for the first time.  This past fall, I flew to Atlanta, where a hitherto unknown cache of Hester’s personal papers—unsent letters, mostly, offering rare examples of her epistolary voice—is kept by a man who knew both Hester and O’Connor.  The new materials shed light on the way that Hester’s sexual identity, her careful and passionate reading, her religious interests, and her outsider status made her the perfect correspondent for both O’Connor and Murdoch.  Feisty, even flirtatious, in her written communications, she challenged O’Connor to write her most profound letters, meditations on the divine that rank with those of C. S. Lewis and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  That correspondence alone has already made Hester a secretly crucial figure in twentieth-century literature; if or when they are released to the public, the thirty years of letters she received from Murdoch will likely broaden our perception of her influence.  But her military file and the other papers also show Hester to have been a tormented woman, resilient yet psychologically fragile. 

In 1948, Hester joined the Air Force.  A little over a year later, while stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, north of San Francisco, she became suicidal and checked herself in to a hospital for psychiatric help.  A medical report from this period describes her as a “rather nice looking very neat girl of medium height.  She speaks very fluently, and uses an extensive vocabulary.”  She “went with a ‘literary’ group” at school, her “main form of recreation is reading,” and “she has always been intensely interested in writing.”  The details that emerge about her early life read like a Flannery O’Connor story.  Her father worked at a filling station; her mother, an educated woman, turned to bootlegging. “ Once, the patient can remember at the age of eight, during a serious quarrel, the mother tried to commit suicide by shooting herself, and then ran outdoors in her underclothes,” the report explains.  Her mother succeeded in killing herself when Hester was fourteen years old.  According to William Sessions, who first met Hester at the ballet in Atlanta, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, and later became her literary executor, Hester’s mother died before her eyes. 

Hester attended Young Harris, a boarding school and college in northern Georgia, but left, according to the medical report, because “a rather aggressive homosexual girl was trying to force her into a physical relationship.”  Hester told that medical examiner, in 1950, that she and this former schoolmate later lived together for a year—and that this was “the only actual physical involvement she has had.”  At age twenty-five, she enlisted.  Fifteen months later, she developed a romantic attachment to a woman in her barracks, a personal crisis that led to her hospital stay. “ I’m feeling better now,” she told her examiner, per the report, “but I turned in to the hospital because I was having too frequent spells of depression, and was having strong urges to do away with myself.”  The infatuation apparently followed an old pattern: “She says that each girl that she has ever been in love with, four of them in all . . .  has some sort of ‘inner decay,’ and is always getting into difficulty,” the report explains.