Archives West Finding Aid

Theresa de Kerpely was born on November 29, 1898, in Ripley, England, the only daughter of Gerald Irvine, an Anglican vicar, and his wife Theresa Wainwright. In 1917, she met and married Edmund Gorst. They had two sons and two daughters. At the end of World War I her husband Edmund joined the British Consular Service, and for the next 15 years his career took the family all over Europe and South America. Edmund died in 1935, and in 1937 Theresa married Eugene de Kerpely, noted Hungarian cellist and professor of music. They lived in Budapest during World War II. In 1948 Theresa and her husband immigrated to the United States, and became U.S. citizens in 1954. They settled in Redlands, California, where Eugene joined the Redlands University music faculty. He died in 1955.

In 1949 Theresa de Kerpely started writing fiction based on some of her experiences during her first husband's diplomatic career and subsequently her exploits during World War II in Budapest. In 1949 she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. She published eight books, some of them Book-of-the-Month selections, and earned critical acclaim. In 1968 she became a member of the Honorary Faculty, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she had been Head of Residence since 1961. Prior to that, in 1958 she had been appointed Head of Residence at Wellesley College. She retired in 1971 and moved to Boston where she devoted all her time and efforts to writing.

In the late 1970s her eyes began to fail, and in 1984, at age 86, she decided to withdraw from her profession as a writer while continuing to write mainly poetry and shorter pieces. She moved to Boise where her older daughter was living with her family, and lived in virtual seclusion in her own apartment.

A few months before her death the State of Israel awarded to her the Medal of the Righteous among Nations for risking her life to save persecuted Jews in the Holocaust period.

Source: Obituary, The Idaho Statesman, September 1, 1993.