Perhaps the ultimate woman's road novel, She Drove Without Stopping presents young Jane Turner's cross-country journey toward self-possession. As she refuses to turn back from a terrain we all know is dangerous to women, her wit wrestles with the violence she encounters on a risky odyssey. She Drove Without Stopping is a lusty and forthright novel. Jaimy Gordon, whose earlier books have earned her reputation as a brilliant stylist, here tells the story of a very young, very bold American woman deciding what she wants. In Jane Turner she has created a character so fresh, so self-consumed and self-righteous, that she reveals secrets of a special and particularly American type of woman.

She Drove Without Stopping is the on-the-road story of brave, brainy, erotic Jane Turner. Child of the fifties, student of the sixties, her sexual identity is molded by affluent America's love affair with Freud, then set at liberty by its Sexual Revolution. Jane is the daughter of a pair of well heeled Baltimoreans whose hobbies include orchid breeding and child psychology. She was born with a strong sexual bent inherited straight from her handsome, philandering father Philip. When she was eight, Philip-on the advice of his wife's analyst-abruptly withdrew his affection from Jane. She was left dumbfounded and bereft. She Drove Without Stopping tells how Jane, at 21, strikes back, how she lights out on a cross-country search for freedom and adventure, how she settles on a life-style that's the stuff of a father's nightmare. Footloose and imprudent, Jane is a girl who will get into an old car on any excuse and drive anywhere, so long as it is far away and no one will know where she is. By the time she's come to the end of her reckless, risky year on the road, Jane's been in love, in danger, in jail, and finally, in control of her life.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the Appellate Courts of Alabama and, Sept. 1928/Jan. 1929-Jan./Mar. 1941, the Courts of Appeal of Louisiana.