The Foolish Virgin

The Foolish Virgin is a 1915 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946), a melodrama of modern marriage in which a sheltered Southern-born New York schoolteacher marries a charming stranger who proves to be a professional criminal. The story follows her flight, her ordeal in the North Carolina mountains, and the regeneration of her husband through the influence of motherhood and honest labour. Dixon wrote the book at the height of his popular success, and it was filmed in 1916 with Clara Kimball Young and again in 1924. The novel shows the sensational moralising style that made Dixon one of the best-selling American storytellers of the 1910s, applied here to urban crime and domestic life rather than his usual Reconstruction subjects. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.