Hungerheart.
THE ONLY KNOWN COPY
—
INSCRIBED TO A FELLOW LESBIAN AND SUFFRAGETTE
“I had to be a Suffragist” Hungerheart, 265.
[Gender Studies] [Marshall, Christabel; “Christopher St. John.”] Hungerheart. The story of a soul. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., (1915).
8vo.; Table of Contents and facing page offset; 1973 blue ink ownership signature on half-title; binding loose; gutters cracked; blue cloth stamped in blind and gilt; spine sunned; light wear. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this book, part bildungsroman, part roman à clef, in which the narrative traces the development of an lesbian through her gradual denial of her Roman Catholicism; with 35 pages of publishers advertisements in the rear. Yellow slip of paper printing “St John: Ethel Smyth” loosely laid-in between pages 72-73; pencil mark highlighting three paragraphs starting on page 73.
A presentation copy, inscribed to fellow lesbian Vera L. Holme, who was also an active suffragette: Jacko/from the author/Feb.26, 1915. On the verso of the front endpaper, Holme wrote, “The much valued property/of/Vera L. Holme.” Her bookplate, designed by her friend, the illustrator Jessie M. King, is on the front pastedown. (She met and befriended King in Scotland after her own partner, Evelina Haverfield, died in 1919, prompting her move there.) Holme, known as “Jack” to her friends, was a member of the d’Olyly Carte Theatre Company, the Actress’ Franchise League and the Women’s Social and Political Union, a suffragist organization.
A thinly veiled autobiography, Hungerheart follows the narrator – a woman named John-Baptist – from childhood to adulthood. It is, as the subtitle states, the story of a woman’s soul. Divided into two parts; Part I is titled “The World of Ignorance,” and is composed of ten chapters, including: “Infancy,” “Growth,” “Independence,” “In the Theatre,” and “Responsibility.” Part II, “The Cell of Self-Knowledge,” has two chapters, “Light” and “The New Life.” A poignant realization in the “Juvenescence” chapter becomes a motivating factor in the narrator’s life – and in the book – to be “unchained” to her womanhood:
I was sorry to have been born a girl because for a girl apparently there was no human life, only a girl’s life. I learned that man had his life as a human being, and a male life as well. I looked round me, and thought that women had been driven out of their inheritance of a common humanity, and had become merely females. Their minds had been cramped by this, as their bodies had been deformed by tight lacing. They were chained to the rock of womanhood and were pleased with their chains. Made arrogant by the sensation of a wide and deep humanity at its dawn, I dreamed my destiny to be that of Perseus.
The chapter titled, “Responsibility,” is completely devoted to Marshall’s pro-suffrage arguments, and blurs the line between her own experience and that of her protagonist. Marshall/John-Baptist claims that, at first, she was disinterested in the suffrage movement. As time passed, her opinions changed.
When I saw that it was round the right of every woman born into the world to exercise that free will, rather than round a vote, that this struggle was being carried on, I could not stand on the bank and give tea and comfortable advice to the swimmers. I plunged into the stream. No one who has not taken that plunge has any notion of the strength of the current of prejudice against the women who are fighting for the principle that their existence should not be limited to certain episodes in the lives of men. That principle is the life-blood of the woman’s suffrage movement.” (267)
She follows with accounts of harassment directed toward her – by both women and men – while fighting for the Cause. She met with opposition while distributing suffrage literature, giving speeches, and attending a rally – for which participation she was sent to prison for one month. Shortly after this incident, John-Baptist quit the suffrage movement to focus her attention on writing. She describes the movement as “a hungry monster…devouring time, money, health, talent, artistic fever, powers of loving, [and] powers rebelling against injustice” (272).
Although it is clearly a feminist tract, Hungerheart has an unexpected religious tone. Marshall often compares the Suffrage movement to the struggle early Christians had converting followers.
This moral epidemic, as I call the movement of women to obtain recognition as human beings, continues to spread, in spite of a powerful and immoral opposition. No generous creature, whether male or female, is able to resist its contagion. …Is it an illusion that this is one of the great movements of humanity from which time to time renew and regenerate this old world? That question will be answered in time, but never to the complete satisfaction of the old world. To the children of darkness light is ever an illusion, though experience prove it truth. Witness, Christianity. (275-276).
John-Baptist refers to her lover, Sally, with religious language as well: “‘She is Christ’s’ I thought that night, ‘and Christ lives in her.’ That impression has grown with our intimacy, beloved friend of my soul. We are taught to see Him in the sinner and the outcast, in the sick and in the poor; in all those little ones of the earth to whom if we minister, we minister to Him. But less is said about recognizing Him in a friend” (315-316).
Hungerheart is punctuated by several of John-Baptist’s homosexual relationships and infatuations; she names her love interests as Lady Martha and Violet, Marya, Roxane, Giovanna Ludini, the Shakespearian actress Louise Canning and her daughter Sally (“Sally, who was soon to be my Sally in a very special sense”) (218). These, of course, were pseudonyms; “Louise Canning” was the real-life Shakespearian actress Ellen Terry—whom Marshall set out to meet early on and through whom she met her daughter, Edith Craig, who would become her lifelong partner—the “Sally” of this book. In the book, John-Baptist and Sally lived together; the second paragraph in the chapter on “Friendship” beings, “I used to wonder which was the husband and which was the wife in the ménage! Sally looked after me with a care that was almost maternal” (219). Marshall was drawing on her experience of living together with Craig and the artist Clare Atwood; the trio shared a house in Smallhyte, England.
Marshall, Craig, Atwood, Holme and King were prominent and successful in their respective fields, despite their sexual preference. Marshall’s protagonist seems to have been aware of her homosexuality from an early age. In the chapter titled, “Education,” she writes: “In my struggles towards the light of love, on which the nursemaid Nennie, my unknown father and mother, Lady Martha, the drawing-mistress at school, yes, even the barmaid, all had an influence, I never dreamed of a fairy prince who should deliver me from the anguish of unfulfilled desire” (91).
Marshall wrote her first biography of Ellen Terry in 1907, and also edited Terry’s correspondence with George Bernard Shaw for publication. She also assisted Terry in completing her autobiography. One scholar writes that “her contribution to the Terry legend sadly outshadows many of her other accomplishments.” She is the co-author – along with Cicely Hamilton – of at least one theatrical work, How the Vote was Won (1909); and translated a play by Hrotsvit titled Gallicanus and Dulcitius, in 1923.
Marshall (1871-1960) was known by the name of Christopher St. John. She was the youngest of nine children of the novelist Emma Marshall and Hugh Graham Marshall, a bank manager. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she specialized in history and translations. Upon graduation, she moved to London where she worked as a temporary secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill and Winston Churchill. She changed her name after her conversion to Catholicism in adulthood. When she was twenty-four years old she moved in with Edith Craig. She published her first book five years later, titled The Crimson Weed (1900). Throughout her life, she worked as an actress, wrote articles and translations, published her own original work and wrote music criticism. She was a member of the Stage Society, where she was billed as “Christabel Marshall,” but her translation of The Good Hope, performed by the Stage Society, was attributed to Christopher St. John.
In 1911, Craig and Terry founded the Pioneer Players Society, and St. John worked as a dramatist, translator and actor for the group. Other books she published are The Golden Book (1911), which was about her relationship with Criag, and To Edy: Recollections of Edith Craig (1949). She also edited the Shaw-Terry Correspondence (1931), Ellen Terry’s Memoirs (1932), and Terry’s Four Lectures on Shakespeare (1932), wrote music criticism for the periodicals The Lady, and Time and Tide, under the initials C.M., from 1920 to 1931. She also published biographies of Christine Murrell M.D. (1935) and Ethyl Smythe (1958).
Outside of the theatre, St. John was active in the women’s suffrage movement, writing plays and articles supporting the cause. She was arrested in 1909 for setting fire to a pillar boc. She was also involved in the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society and the Women Writers Suffrage League. For the WWSL, St. John was photographed holding a banner with Edith Craig and Cecily Hamilton during a street procession in 1910. All three of these women acted in a suffrage play titled, A Pageant of Great Women (1909), which was written by Hamilton and Craig, and preformed nationwide.
A true rarity: OCLC and RLG record no copies.
http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/hrotsvit.html
http://www.starcourse.org/emd/cicelyhamilton.html
http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/print?articleId=71799&fullArticle=true&tocId=7173
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