The Eleventh Virgin is a gripping novel about a young woman who is navigating her life in the modern period of the early 1900s. This work is commonly known to be an "autobiographical, preconversion novel" of the writer, Dorothy Day.[1] Dorothy Day disliked The Eleventh Virgin and was known to comment on it that it was a “very bad book.”[2] This is thought to be due to the fact that she was ashamed to how similar her novel was to her own life. The life of June, the novel's protagonist, parallels Dorothy Day's with great accuracy. The topics of sex, promiscuity, affairs, birth control, free speech, women's rights, and abortion are covered in this intriguing story.
The book starts by briefly introducing June at the age of four. The book continues to go through June's childhood and adolescent years and the different situations she went through like her time in university or her time at the different newspaper companies. While reading I was struck by the lax approach to religion and the generally unstructured child-rearing practices adopted by June's parents which ultimately lead to her radical beliefs like on commitment and love. This reminded me of the countless examples of modern day parents who let their child wander rather than guiding them to choose what is right.
Dorothy Day's insights into the human heart are profound. Her portrayal of June, who hungrily searches for love in countless crushes and an ultimately abusive and dysfunctional relationship in the third part of the book, is intensely heart-wrenching. This love drives her to the extreme act of putting a selfish man's wants above another human's rights and this decision ultimately leaves her alone.
The Eleventh Virgin is like no other book I have read. I would recommend this book if you would like to come to a better learn about Dorothy Days earlier years and gain an understanding of the problems women at that time period encountered. These problems have greatly impacted humanity, even up until to the present day. I enjoyed the clear structure of the book, which is split up into three parts covering June's "adolescence", "still adolescence", and "not so much".[3] In regards to Dorothy Day, Miller states, "She was a figure who moved out of the social encyclicals of the popes and who then underwrote them in the thought and action of her life."[4] Let us learn from this writing of Dorothy Day's and her pre-conversion experiences and then choose to live lives fully dedicated to Christ.
[1] Roberts, Nancy L. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost).
[2] Day, Dorothy. The Eleventh Virgin. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1924 (out of print) at: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/1.html.
[3] Day, Dorothy. The Eleventh Virgin. 1924.
[4] Miller, W. D. "Day, Dorothy." New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 545-546. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Virtual Reference Library. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3407703054/GVRL?u=23009&sid=GVRL&xid=d000a7b6.
The Eleventh Virgin is available for purchase on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Eleventh-Virgin-Dorothy-Day/dp/0983760519
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