She was born to Patrick St. John, a writer and film maker, and Dympna Brawn, a poet, and had two brothers and a sister.

She was named after Julian of Norwich and Anna Livia Plurabelle, the character from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.

[4][5] The family moved to Luanshya, Zambia in 1960, and then to Swaziland where she attended the Waterford Kamhlaba boarding school in Mbabane.

Livia attended the Rosa Bassett School in South London for her primary and secondary education.

Livia graduated from the University College London in 1979 with a Bachelors of Arts in French with a minor in Italian.

"[9] Sally Munt, in her exploration of lesbian novels between 1979 and 1989, generally views the novel positively, but states that it is filled with "counter-cultural specificities of early 1980s London feminism,"[10] that border on the "self-referential claustrophobia which can sentence a text to obscurity outside its own sycophantic subculture.