When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. 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's 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 Welty. In A Virtuous Woman, Gibbons transcends her early promise, creating a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.
Editorial Reviews
"Kaye Gibbons shows us the secret core of a love that easily outlasts death. It's invisible mastery—but mastery all the same." —Reynolds Price
"So true and so vital I would swear that there were moments when A Virtuous Woman actually vibrated in my hands." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Complex, compact . . . onen thinks of a Lillian Hellman play. . . . The architecture of this novel is remarkable." —Padgett Powell, The New York Times Book Review
"A small masterpiece...Explores the depth and breadth of love with compassion and without sentimentality. We are left both stunned and wiser." —San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Kaye Gibbons lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael, and their three daughters, Mary, Leslie, and Louise. Her first novel, Ellen Foster, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was accorded a special citation by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
![Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print in the 140 years since its publication. Anne Perry writes in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic (set from the “New Edition” of 1861), “[The Woman in White] has lasted, to our great pleasure, because it is superb storytelling about people who engage our minds and our imaginations.”](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/298/633/WomaninWhite2__08350.1659381018.jpg?c=2 "Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print in the 140 years since its publication. Anne Perry writes in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic (set from the “New Edition” of 1861), “[The Woman in White] has lasted, to our great pleasure, because it is superb storytelling about people who engage our minds and our imaginations.”")
