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.<br>In <I>A Virtuous Woman</I> Kaye Gibbons transcends her early promise creating a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.