Eleventh Virgin
The Eleventh Virgin is Dorothy Day's first and only novel, published in 1924, nearly a decade before she and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker and three years before her reception into the Catholic Church. It is thinly veiled autobiography: June Henreddy, its protagonist, follows Day's own path from a Chicago childhood through the University of Illinois, into radical journalism in New York for The Call and The Masses, into the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, into jail at Occoquan after picketing the White House with suffragists in 1917, and into a ruinous love affair that ends in abortion and abandonment. Day wrote it in her twenties, still a socialist and still unbaptized, out of the wreckage of that affair and with no idea what her life would become.
The book is not a conversion narrative and makes no religious argument. What it does is trace, with unsentimental attention, the cost of a particular kind of freedom. June's radicalism is real and her hunger for the abundant life is real, but the novel keeps returning to the gap between the emancipation she claims and the servitude she actually enters — to a man, to a set of poses, to the anesthetic of drink and talk. The prison chapters are the book's moral center: hunger strike, solitary, the sudden recognition of solidarity with the genuinely destitute rather than with the theorists of destitution. The abortion is rendered flatly and is the only extended account of it Day ever committed to paper; she never wrote of it again in the memoirs. The novel ends without absolution, on a note closer to exhaustion than to resolution.
Day came to despise the book. She called it bad, tried to buy back and destroy copies, and regarded its publication as an exposure she had inflicted on people she loved. Its consequences were nevertheless considerable: the money from the sale of film rights bought the Staten Island beach cottage where her conversion took shape, and the FBI later kept the novel on file as evidence of her character. For readers of The Long Loneliness and From Union Square to Rome, it is the missing first volume — the life as the pre-Catholic Day saw it, without the retrospective grace that orders the later accounts.
Who should read this: readers already committed to Day who want to see what she was converted from, and scholars of American radicalism, the Catholic Worker, or conversion narrative. It is not devotional reading, it is not spiritual formation, and it is not where anyone should begin with Day. Start with The Long Loneliness; come here afterward, if at all.