Kaye Gibbons burst upon the American literary scene at the age of twenty-seven with publication of her Southern coming-of-age novel, Ellen Foster. This short novel tells the story of plucky, spirited Ellen, eleven going on thirty, a survivor who faces the suicide of her abused mother, fends off the drunken advances of her father, and deals with the malignant neglect of aunts and a grandmother to finally find a family for her herself. Something of a female Huck Finn, Ellen Foster, both character and novel, won the hearts of readers and earned prestigious literary awards for its young Southern author. The novel became the first in a string of bestsellers for Gibbons, all set in the South and told in the simple vernacular of that region.

Resilient is a word often used to describe a typical Kaye Gibbons character. Her female protagonists are survivors, quiet domestic heroines in...