True Women: A Novel of Texas

by Janice Woods Windle

Overview

Alive and pulsating with the events of our history, TRUE WOMEN tells the story of two dynastic family lines in Texas, the Kings and the Woodses. Euphemia Texas Ashby King could ride and shoot like any man, and she was there when Sam Houston's rag-tag army routed Santa Anna at San Jacinto . . . . Though she risked her plantation running the Yankee cotton blockade during the Civil War, Georgia Virginia Lawshe Woods still had to defend her family from a corrupt Yankee officer . . . . Bettie Moss King survived wolves, storms, and the Ku Klux Klan to steer her family through the turbulent birth of modern times.
Inspired by the author's own Texas roots, here is an unforgettable saga of the grit, determination, and courage of TRUE WOMEN.
""Heartfelt . . . The hardships and adventures faced by [this] family are so movingly described that I was in tears." — The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804113083
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/30/1994
Series:	Novel of Texas Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Janice Woods Windle was born and raised in Texas. Her upbringing informed her novel True Women. She has lived in El Paso since 1961 with her husband, Wayne Windle. Mrs. Windle became CEO and President of the El Paso Community Foundation in 1977.

Editorial Reviews

As Windle passed on amazing folklore about the women in the Woods, King, and Lawshe families of Seguin, Texas, to her children, their skepticism plunged her into an ancestral search to validate these hair-raising tales of Indian raids, visits from Sam Houston and Santa Anna, the murder of a Union general, and more. Windle culled thousands of documents and interviews and melded them into this novel, which focuses on Euphemia, Georgia, and Bettie and incorporates the adventures of many other female relations--black, white, and American Indian. American history, Texas style, along with a pointed, personal look at women's issues from survival to suffrage, awaits any reader who opens these hard-to-close pages.

Denise Perry Donavin

A Texan first-novelist offers a sweeping historical based on the lives of her own female ancestors—a three-generational epic brimful with all the energy, drama, and occasional ingenuousness one expects from the Lone Star State. Whenever Windle trotted out the family legends of how her maternal great-great-grandmother Euphemia Texas Ashby King scared a Comanche raider off her land with a rifle, or how her paternal great-grandmother Georgia Lawshe Woods shot a Yankee captain for threatening her daughter's virtue, her children expressed doubt that women ever behaved in such a way. The result is this exhaustively researched tale of the King and Woods clans, who farmed, fought, and bred in the fertile south-central towns of San Marcos and Seguin. Beginning with five-year-old Euphemia's witnessing the aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, which led to a mass female flight away from Santa Anna's army, Windle traces Euphemia's return to Seguin, where she marries one of the infamous Rowdy King Boys, establishes a horse-breeding farm, and begins a dynasty of her own—all while fending off Comanche and panther attacks and weathering the whipsawing political scene as Texas becomes a republic, then a state, then a member of the Confederacy, and finally a state again. Meanwhile, Georgia Lawshe, a plantation-owner's daughter, is ripped from her genteel surroundings to resettle with her physician husband in sleepy San Marcos. Practical Georgia soon establishes a thriving cotton plantation and refuses to be distracted even by the Civil War from supervising the building of a family estate. The stubborn, make-do genes of these two pioneer women come in handy through several moregenerations of Texas females—who suffer through tornados, Yankee occupations, death, divorce, and the Depression with relative aplomb—before combining in the form of the author herself. Windle stumbles occasionally in her effort to justify some of her protagonists' actions—but the author's passion for the landscapes and people of Texas overshadows these minor flaws. (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild Dual Selection for February)

Kirkus Reviews