Ellen Foster

Ellen Foster is a work of adult fiction by US novelist Kaye Gibbons, first published by Algonquin Books in 1987. The novel was Gibbons’s debut, and it won the Sue Kaufman Prize for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a notable citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Critics praised the novel for its unsentimental outlook and the wry, distinct voice of its protagonist. Ellen, a young girl living in the American South, is bounced from place to place until she finds a home with a foster family. Gibbons later shared that the novel was semi-autobiographical. It inspired a Hallmark movie made in 1997 and a sequel, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, published in 2006.

This guide uses the Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition of Ellen Foster published in 1990.

Content Warning: The source material referenced in this guide contains references to domestic violence, child sexual assault and psychological abuse, child neglect, suicide, alcohol use, anti-Black racism, bigoted language, and racial slurs, including the n-word, which this guide does not replicate.

Plot Summary

Ellen Foster spans around two years of the life of a young white girl living in an unidentified town in the Southern US in the late 1970s or early 1980s.