Fair and Tender Ladies, by Lee Smith, was published in 1988. It is an epistolary novel, told through letters written by a Virginia mountain girl named Ivy Rowe to various recipients, and spans the course of Ivy’s life from childhood in the early 1900s to her death in the 1970s.

Plot Summary

When Fair and Tender Ladies begins, Ivy Rowe is a poor, mostly uneducated girl from Sugar Fork, Virginia, who has begun writing letters at the suggestion of her schoolteacher, Mrs. Brown. Through these letters, Ivy reveals the circumstances of her life.

While she shows a talent for writing and dreams of getting an education, Ivy, who is one of eight children, stops going to school in order to help her family. Her father, a coal miner, dies soon after of heart problems, and Ivy’s mother decides to move the family to Majestic, Virginia, to help at her friend Geneva’s boardinghouse in exchange for a discounted rate.

Ivy’s mother sells mineral rights to her property so that Ivy can go back to school. Ivy begins dating a boy named Lonnie Rash, and she gets pregnant the first time she has sex with him. Lonnie wants to marry Ivy before he goes to fight in World War I, but Ivy refuses. To get away from Majestic, Ivy moves to Diamond to live with her sister Beulah and Beulah’s husband, Curtis.

In Diamond, Ivy gives birth to a daughter, Joli. At Beulah and Curtis’s insistence, Ivy begins dating the mine superintendent’s unhinged son, Franklin. Franklin tries to drive away with Ivy, and when she insists he turn the car around, he drives into a bridge in an attempt to injure them both. After an explosion in the mine kills 18 men and injures Oakley Fox, whom Ivy knows from her early childhood in Sugar Fork, Ivy is so shaken by the event that she marries Oakley and moves back to Sugar Fork with him.

Once Ivy is back Sugar Fork, her writing becomes more infrequent, with each part of the novel covering longer spans of time. Areas near Sugar Fork get electricity for the first time, and Ivy and Oakley have four children together: Bill, Danny Ray, LuIda, and Maudy. Ivy sends Joli away to get an education, and Ivy and Oakley start to drift apart as Ivy becomes unsatisfied with her mundane life on the farm. When a man named Honey Breeding comes around to help Oakley install beehives, Ivy has an affair with him and disappears for several days. In her absence, LuIda dies, and Ivy’s grief causes her not to write for many years.

Following her affair, Ivy feels a stronger connection to her husband, and they remain together until his death. Later in life, Ivy fights with the coal company over her land and wins. In her old age, she takes long walks in the mountains and finds the time to take up reading again, feeling she is finally free to do what she wants.