Personal Review: Chile Woman By Gayl Jones

Gayl Jones is the author of numerous novels, poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism that has impressed critics and readers alike with intense and often brutal explorations of the legacy of violence in African-American communities. In particular, Jones confronts the sexual and psychological abuse of women, while also focusing on the social and cultural forces that contribute to that violence. Highly acclaimed as a novelist, Jones was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998. Gayl Jones was born on November 23, 1949, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Franklin and Lucille Jones, Jones began writing short stories in grade school and soon impressed her family and teachers with her natural ability. She came from a creative background; her
During this time she wrote her first play, Chile Woman, which won the award for the best original production at the New England Regional American College Theatre Festival in 1973. As a graduate student, Jones studied with poet Michael S. Harper, who took an interest in the manuscript of her first novel. He submitted the manuscript to Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, and Corregidora was published in 1975. The novel portrays the life of a blues singer, Ursa Corregidora, who confronts the legacy of exploitation in her family’s past and the manifestations of abuse in her personal life. Jones’s frank depictions of the psychological dimensions of racial and sexual violence earned high praise from such notable critics as novelist John Updike. “One of the book’s merits,” wrote Updike, “is the ease with which it assumes the writer’s right to sexual specifics, and its willingness to explore exactly how our sexual and emotional behavior is warped within the matrix of family and race.” Jones continued to explore the dynamics of violence between men and women in her next novel, Eva’s Man