In 1844, Asenath Nicholson, a school teacher, reformer and proprietor of an all-vegetarian boarding house in New York City, travelled to Ireland to "personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor." Upon her arrival, she saw the beginnings of the Great Famine, a seven-year period of mass starvation and disease in which it is estimated over one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland. Nicholson's writings and first-hand observations from the time are stitched together to form the narrative backdrop of The Hunger, a multi-media opera by Donnacha Dennehy.