This book examines Lee Smith's novel-length fiction and its powerful reflection of her personal search for and journey toward spiritual reconciliation. The protagonists of Smith's novels feel estranged from any sense of feminine sacredness as they struggle in their individual searches for a belief system that offers them hope and validation. Chapters describe how Smith has retrieved in her fiction a source of trans formative power - the power of the sexual, maternal, feminine divine - in hopes of creating a new image of the total, sacred female whose sexuality, creativity, spirituality, and maternity can reside comfortably in the bodies of everyday heroines....