SOURCE: A review of A Virtuous Woman, in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VI, Nos. 10-11, July 1989, p. 21.

Chandler is an Indian-born American educator, essayist, and critic. In the following review, she examines the themes of loyalty, self-sacrifice, compassion, and love in A Virtuous Woman.

"Until death do us part" is a line couples tend to utter with increasing dubiousness, if not irony. Why people couple, why they stay coupled and what happens to them when death uncouples them, are disturbing questions in a culture committed to contradictory ideals of self-actualization and lasting relationship. In a time of chronic mass confusion about the business of love and marriage, Kaye Gibbons' short novel [A Virtuous Woman] about a dying woman and her husband's unhappy survival provides an unsentimental tribute to and reminder of the old virtues of loyalty, tolerance, compassion and forgiveness that are the real stuff of...