A Virtuous Woman

A novel by the author of "Ellen Foster".

"Kaye Gibbons shows us the secret core of a love that easily outlasts death. It's invisible mastery - but mastery all the same".
Reynolds Prince When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

Kaye Gibbons' first novel - "Ellen Foster", won the "Sue Kaufman Prize" for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the praise of writers from Walker Percy to Eudora Welby. In "A Virtuous Woman", Gibbons transcends her early promise, creating a multi layered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.

"Complex, compact... one thinks of a Lillian Hellman play... The architecture of this novel is remarkable".
New York Times