A Family of Good Women: A Novel Rooted in the Texas Panhandle
A Family of Good Women
by Teddy Jones
Historical Novel | 306 pages
I came to A Family of Good Women while on a literary pilgrimage to the Larry McMurtry Literary Center (LMLC) in Archer City, Texas. While there, I met Teddy Jones. We attended a writing workshop together, and she gave a reading of her novel to a full house at LMLC.
Jones’s book held its place on my To Be Read shelf until January. I was reading A Family of Good Women on the day award-winning poet Renée Nicole Good was shot by ICE in Minneapolis, about a thirty-minute drive from where we live. That shared name, Good, was impossible to ignore.
Where It Begins
A Family of Good Women is a historical novel about building a life with the people who show up and the people you choose without losing yourself. The story begins with six Texan women living in the Victorian era who want children but not husbands. They refuse to live under the authority of men or laws that treat them as property. Instead, they change their last name to Good and form a family on their own terms.
The novel centers on one of their daughters, Imogene Good. After her mother’s death, Imogene leaves Burkburnett and travels more than two hundred miles to Borger to open a boarding house. Over time, Imognene forms a found family through shared work, mutual responsibility, and choice.
What Stayed With Me
One of the novel’s strengths is its steadiness. Jones resists extremes. Some men are dangerous or unreliable. Others are decent, steady, and supportive. Sue Ellen, Imogene’s runaway cousin, moves in, and it takes time to sort out whether her arrival will help or hurt the life and business Imogene is building.
The novel allows safety and risk, kindness and harm, to coexist without forcing easy conclusions.
Place and the Life of a House
Set in Borger, a fast-growing oil boomtown in the Texas Panhandle, a place built too quickly. It’s volatile, unsettled, and hungry for more. Opportunity and threat live side by side.
Jones summed up the landscape in three stark elements: wheat, wind, and dust. She also pointed out that rural is not always the same. There are farm people, cattle people, and oil people. Those categories tend to carry different relationships to the land. Farm people are the most rooted. Oil people, she said, tend to be the most transient. That distinction matters in a place like Borger, where so much of life is built on extraction, movement, and the promise of quick money.
Against that backdrop, the boarding house Imogene runs becomes a living presence in the novel, and the food she serves there plays a meaningful role. Her meals remind people of their mothers, of home, of something reliable. They provide comfort and community.
Time and Perspective
For me, reading this novel highlighted how rarely I’ve read fiction set between the late 1800s and the 1920s. Faith, morality, and womanhood are treated as questions rather than settled truths, and the independence of the Good women feels both historically grounded and radical.
Since I first met Jones at the Larry McMurtry Literary Center, I couldn’t resist asking if his work influenced hers at all. After all, she grew up just 35 miles north of him. She counted his novels Horseman Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne as being profoundly important to her, especially Leaving Cheyenne, a book she’s read four times.
When I asked Jones where a reader might go to feel as if they were walking in Imogene’s footsteps, she laughed and seemed doubtful there’d be much to “see.” Places like this, she said, are utility-based, built for use, not tourism. Borger isn’t the kind of town you pass through. No major highway runs through it. It’s a place you have to choose on purpose.
That, too, feels true to the novel.
More Texas Book and Travel Posts:
- Larry McMurtry Literary Center: A Booklover’s Pilgrimage
- Welcome to Archer City: A Literary Texas Getaway
- Dr Pepper Museum, Waco, TX | Larry McMurtry Roads Connection
- Roads by Larry McMurtry: A Literary Road Trip Review
Where To Buy Your Copy of A Family of Good Women
Purchase your copy of A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones and support independent booksellers.
If you enjoy this novel, I’m pleased to share that Teddy Jones’s follow-up, Far From Uncertain, is equally compelling. It revisits some familiar faces from Borger, Texas, and is well worth reading after this one.
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