7 h 34 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 7 h 34 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does innocence cost when love meets temptation?
The Foolish Virgin, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1915 romance, brings love, innocence, and moral judgment into the same frame. Dixon writes with a preacher’s eye for right and wrong. This is a romance of its own time, where questions of temptation and experience give love a sharper edge.
The title points to the parable of the ten virgins in the Gospel of Matthew. In that story, young women carry lamps to meet a bridegroom; readiness matters, and being unprepared carries a cost. That reference gives readers a way into the novel’s concerns with innocence and responsibility.
What you’ll discover
- Love under moral scrutiny Explore a romance that asks you to weigh love alongside questions of right and wrong.
- The cost of innocence Consider the tension between innocence and experience in a tale framed by love and redemption.
- A title with resonance Trace the title’s connection to a biblical parable about readiness and the cost of being unprepared.
- A preacher’s moral lens Meet the moral perspective of a novelist whose background includes work as a Baptist minister.
- A critical reading lens Read with awareness that Dixon’s wider work includes racist novels defending white supremacy.
Who will love it
Readers who like early twentieth century American fiction, stories of courtship and marriage, vivid settings from Manhattan to the Blue Ridge, and novels that argue openly about what women and men owe each other.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A girl waits for her Fate
- A stranger in the library
- Speed, the sea and a proposal
- Jane's warning and the workshop
- The wedding and the lotus island
- Cat-tail Peak and the cabin
- What the pearls reveal
- The night of the new god
- What the story is about
Who’s who
- Mary AdamsA Kentucky minister's daughter who teaches in New York and dreams of one destined love, a home and a child.
- Jim AnthonyA red-haired, steel-eyed young man who says he is an inventor and an orphan, and who courts Mary with startling speed.
- Jane AndersonA successful artist and Mary's closest friend, who lives by reason and fears her friend's blind romance.
- EllaThe one-eyed janitress who loves Mary, keeps her own past secret, and watches Jim with suspicion.
- Nance OwensA poor mountain woman who hides moonshine whiskey and has long mourned a son stolen from her.
- Dr. MulfordA gray-haired physician living in a log house on the mountainside, who heals the poor and studies motherhood.
- Dr. CraddockThe popular Methodist preacher of New York who marries Mary and Jim and preaches on the woman of the future.
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- Audiobook
- 7 h 34 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
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Read and hear Die törichte Jungfrau in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Die törichte Jungfrau
by Thomas Dixon Jr. · 1915
A schoolteacher waiting for her destined love follows a red-haired stranger into a marriage with secrets.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
The Foolish Virgin is a novel by Thomas Dixon Jr., set in New York and the mountains of North Carolina in the years before the First World War. It follows Mary Adams, a Kentucky preacher's daughter who teaches school in the city and waits for the one man God has made for her.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A girl waits for her Fate
Mary Adams is twenty-four and lives in one small room above Madison Square in New York. She teaches in the public schools for sixty dollars a month, but she does not believe women were meant to work for wages. Her dream is a home, a husband and a baby, and she is sure that God has set aside one man for her.
Her one close friend is Jane Anderson, a successful artist who lives by reason and ambition. Jane begs Mary to sit for the painter Gordon, who needs her head for a Madonna. Mary refuses at once, because the artist is married and the idea frightens her. Jane laughs at her and calls her a foolish virgin, and she warns that the day Mary meets her Fate may be the day she is ruined.
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What is The Foolish Virgin about?
It follows Mary Adams, a New York schoolteacher raised in a Kentucky minister's home, who becomes engaged to a mysterious young inventor after one week. Her honeymoon trip into the North Carolina mountains tests her faith, her ideas about love and her courage.
Who wrote The Foolish Virgin and when?
Thomas Dixon Jr. wrote it. It is set in the years of Model T automobiles and Asheville mountain resorts, with a story that places it in the early twentieth century, when debates about women and marriage were lively.
Why is Mary called a foolish virgin?
Her friend Jane Anderson uses the phrase for her, echoing the old parable of the maidens. It marks Mary as a trusting girl who guards her purity and dreams of one destined love, yet knows little about the world.
The author
Thomas Dixon Jr.
1864–1946 · American white supremacist novelist
Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946) was an American writer, Baptist minister, lawyer, and politician. He was born in Shelby, North Carolina, and died in Raleigh, North Carolina. He also lived in New York City. His novels included The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905). He promoted white supremacy.
More by Thomas Dixon Jr.
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