“A Virtuous Woman”
by Kaye Gibbons
Published: November 1997
ISBN: 0375703063

(Updated: February 12, 2007.)

From the Publisher…

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.

So… “ask and it is given” :o) After pondering “short stories” in my last posting, after wondering whether one story per book cover would make me happier about “short stories”, I found myself reading this book. And although this book is classified as a novel, I would call a great (and satisfying :o) longer-short story.

Reading it was a pleasure and although the title, A Virtuous Woman, points to the female main character, there are actually two equally main characters… Ruby and Jack. And although I’m not sure if Ruby is more virtuous than most women I know, Jack is a good man. And, yes, I’m not sure if he is more “good” than most men I know but he is “good”. Too.

So… reading the inner voices of “good” people is, well, good. And a pleasure. And is somehow quickly over. It doesn’t have to be (c.f. Rush Home Road) but in this case it was. And the length was “just” right for the story presented.

All in all, I give this book a three out of five (“good” :o) hearts.