Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4123 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-05
• Released on: 1997-11-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.com
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Gibbons's novel, A Virtuous Woman, takes place in the same hardscrabble part of the world as Ellen Foster. The virtuous woman is Ruby Pitt Woodrow, a woman who might have ended up like Ellen Foster's mother if fate, in the shape of Jack Stokes, hadn't crossed her path. The daughter of prosperous farmers, Ruby runs off with a migrant worker who treats her badly, then abandons her far from home. When she meets Jack, a man 20 years her senior, she's working as a cleaning woman in another prosperous farmer's house. Jack is a man women don't look at even once, let alone twice; Ruby is a woman who needs someone to take care of her. Out of this unlikely union grows a quiet kind of love that is no less powerful for being unstated.

Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman share more than just location and a few characters in common. Though each is a complete novel in and of itself, taken together the two books resonate one another: Ellen Foster and Ruby Pitt Woodrow are both damaged people who find the kind of love they need to heal. These multilayered novels are tough-minded and resolutely unsentimental, just like their protagonists. Yet like Ellen and Ruby, each contains a nut of sweetness at its core that takes the bitter edge off the hard lives and hard stories Kaye Gibbons has to tell.

From Publishers Weekly
Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt weave this strong, tightly knit love story in alternating chapters that begin when Jack, grieving over Ruby's death four months earlier, evokes the past. In flashbacks, the two richly cadenced Southern voices explore their vastly differing backgrounds, troubled histories and their unlikely but loving marriage. Born into a proud, prominent country family, coddled and adored, Ruby stuns her parents and two brothers by inexplicably running off with John Woodrow, a migrant worker who savagely abuses her. When John is killed in a brawl, Ruby, too proud to ask her family for help, begins doing housework for the wealthy Hoover family, where she meets Jack, a laconic, immensely capable tenant farmer on the Hoover land. He is 40; she is 20. Both lonely and vulnerable, they regard each other cautiously, carry on a wary courtship and embark on a firmly grounded marriage. The union is enriched by a small, supportive circle of friends, who, like the couple's landlord, Burr, are sharply etched and convincingly drawn. Gibbons, author of the critically praised Ellen Foster , has written a vivid, unsentimental, powerful novel. Literary Guild and Double day Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-- In alternating chapters, Ruby and Jack Stokes tell of their adult lives: her elopement and hellish life with an abusive migrant farmer, Ruby and Jack's meeting and subsequently happy marriage, and their relationships with Jack's landlord and friend, Burr; his self-centered wife and son; and June, his lovely daughter, whom the Stokes love dearly. Gibbons develops distinct voices for Ruby and Jack, and their reminiscences paint vibrant portraits of themselves and others. The story will prod readers to think about the nature of friendship and love.
- Alice Conlon, University of Houston
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Worth reading - a treatise on love
The writing in this book is so good that I've read it twice. (Something I NEVER do. Nev. Er.) A Virtuous Woman tells the story of a married couple, Ruby and Jack, who meet each other, fall in love, and marry. Ruby later contracts lung cancer. Facing her death, she ruminates on her adventures and tries her best to prepare Jack to live without her. Jack savors the memories of the two of them, even as he knows he must move beyond them to continue his life. Chapters of the novel are alternately narrated by each of the two primary characters, a style which is effective because it lets us see the inner thoughts of both.

I enjoyed how this novel dealt with the definition of love. It is a subject worth considering, and one that can easily become maudlin. However, Gibbons' characters look at it with a steady, nearly objective eye. The characters know who they are and what they need from a mate. And when they find one another, there is a quiet cherishing that they do of one another. The love Gibbons writes of is a wise love, not young and foolish, not headstrong and impassioned, but matter-of-fact and solid as bedrock. I can appreciate such a story.

Wonderful
This was a quick and fabulous read! I felt as if I knew each of the characters.

Time waster
So, let's see. A virtuous woman is one who'll marry anyone who asks her to, one who'll leave considerate parents without a backward wave because a man with an attractive face suggests doing so, one who decides to take up a distasteful habit to prove she's capable of vice. Each of the characters in this one-dimensional book is either exclusively good or exclusively bad. That choice of character template is lazy and insulting to readers who're aware that humanity can't be sorted so effortlessly. This review is based on the first ten chapters of the book. I wish I'd had the good sense to quit reading beyond chapter one. This is the last book I'll select based on its inclusion in Oprah's "list."