Mary Dove

Jane Gilmore Rushing was born in Pyron, Texas, near Snyder, and spent most of her life in West Texas. She wrote six other novels, was a distinguished alumna of Texas Tech University, and was a member of Texas Institute of Letters. She received the LeBaron R. Barker Jr. Prize in 1975 for Mary Dove and the Texas Literary Award for Fiction in 1984 for Winds of Blame.

A haunting classic from a true daughter of the Rolling Plains Reared in isolation by her father on the Western prairie, Mary Dove has been taught to fear only one thing. One sparkling October day it happens. The inevitable stranger rides in off the plains, and Mary Dove does what she had always promised her father she would--she shoots. Yet compassion overcomes Mary's fear. In remorse, she tends to the wounded stranger, and what follows is their tentative discovery of each other and a love story that weaves universal and timeless themes. The mother who died before Mary Dove could know her was African-American. And so completely has Mary Dove's father sheltered her that she cannot begin to comprehend what society would so cruelly teach her. Archetypal in their blamelessness and in how deeply they must suffer for their love, Mary Dove and her cowboy, "Red" Christopher Columbus Jones, are so thoroughly West Texan that they prove Rushing's mastery of character and place.

Mary Dove Mary Dove and Red Sisters