Hungerheart

We meet Joanna "John" Montolivet as she discovers the nature of the world and God's existence from her infancy to juvenescence. John dreams of the erotic and splendid, expressing her yearning through writing, reading great books of literature, and admiring the female figure and sensibility. Coming of age in a discordant family with a "famine" in her heart, she longs for love and passion, leading her to Catholicism, and most importantly, a desire for women.


The desire for same-sex attraction meets at the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul. First published under the male pseudonym Christopher St. John in 1915, Christabel Marshall's work is regarded as the first Catholic lesbian novel. Unlike lesbian novels of the fin de siècle and The New Woman Movement, John's journey of sapphic spirituality and sexuality is not a phase, but the beginning of a lifelong reverence of women. Written at a time of violent censorship and sexual oppression, Marshall's characters represent lesbian, trans, and androgynous people, thinly masked as cisgender and heterosexual. In this publication of Hungerheart, twenty-first-century readers can enjoy Marshall's deeply spiritual love of women in its full glory.