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    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster
    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster
    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster
    Ebook39 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's "Ellen Foster," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 14, 2015
    ISBN9781535822633
    A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster - Gale

      4

      Ellen Foster

      Kaye Gibbons

      1987

      Introduction

      When Kaye Gibbons published Ellen Foster in 1987, the novel—her first—met with an enthusiastic audience. Critics admired Gibbons's skillful creation of Ellen's narrative voice, acknowledging its accuracy in representing a child's point of view. Gibbons won two literary awards for Ellen Foster, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. While some readers criticized the events of the novel as being melodramatic, others asserted that Ellen's wisdom, resilience, and tenacity save her narrative from becoming a sentimental tearjerker. Gibbons has said that some of the events of the novel—Ellen mother's suicide and Ellen's subsequent movement from one relative's home to another—reflect her own childhood experiences. Ellen is indeed a lonely child, quietly observing the happiness of other families, yearning to belong, and making mental notes about what her perfect family should be like. Ellen Foster is ultimately a coming-of-age story, as Ellen engineers for herself a place in the secure, nurturing family she has craved and simultaneously comes to understand herself better through her friendship with Starletta, her black friend. Against the Southern backdrop of racism, Ellen moves from feeling she is superior to Starletta into a new understanding that color has nothing to do with a person's character. Ellen Foster belongs not only to the Southern tradition in American literature, with its distinctive voice and its treatment of racism, but also to that of first-person coming-of-age narratives, in which the narrator's innocence is also his or her wisdom.

      Author Biography

      When Gibbons first published Ellen Foster in 1987, journalists writing about the book—her first novel—wanted to know whether narrator Ellen's troubled childhood reflected in any way the early experiences of her creator.

      Born in 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina, Gibbons, not wanting to draw attention to her own life as a means of publicizing the book, was reluctant at first to discuss her childhood with the press. Eventually though, she revealed that her mother, like Ellen's, had committed suicide when Gibbons was ten, an event which led to her family's breakup and to Gibbons's having to live in a succession of relatives' homes.

      Gibbons went on to graduate from Rocky Mount High School in North Carolina, and while a college student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she began writing a poem in the voice of Starletta. Gibbons told

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