SOURCE: “Kaye Gibbons: Her Full-Time Women,” in Southern Writers at Century's End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins, University Press of Kentucky, 1997, pp. 112-22.

In the following essay, Lewis praises Gibbons's characterization in her novels and discusses some of Gibbons's memorable heroines.

“I think the Southerner is a talker by nature,” said Eudora Welty in an interview twenty years ago, “but not only a talker—we are used to an audience. We are used to a listener and that does something to our narrative style” (Conversations 94).

Storytelling is a Southern tradition. In local stores, on porch steps, the storyteller has had an audience of family and neighbors, and through generations of storytelling, much of local custom, character, and mores has been retained. Southern writers are proud of their past and of their literary heritage. In a changed and changing South, writing from an increasingly confused...