by Kaye Gibbons
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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.
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.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Worth reading - a treatise on love, 2008-07-24
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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Wonderful, 2008-05-26
This was a quick and fabulous read! I felt as if I knew each of the characters.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Time waster, 2008-01-08
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."
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Just kind of ok..., 2007-12-16
The story was fine and it was a quick read with some interesting moments but overall I would not recommend this book unless you just need something to read on a quick flight. I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. I believe if you go into this book thinking it's some amazing novel you will be disappointed. But if you are looking for something light to read without becoming engrossed you will be fine. I certainly wouldn't call this a page turner and have a whole list of books I would recommend before this one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Southern Voices Echo, 2007-06-29
If the theme and heart-felt stories of Souhern souls resonate within your own soul, this is a wonderful read for you. It dares to probe the inner worlds of people in ways you will never forget. Another excellent read from a Southern voice about love, faith and the struggle to become whole can be found in Walking the Trail, One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Cherokee and Alabama author Jerry Ellis. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer and was featured in Readers Digest.
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