Kentucky Woman

Kentucky Woman is a 1993 historical romance by Norah Hess, published by Leisure Books as a 442-page paperback.

Spencer Atkins is introduced through what he does not want: trapping, drinking and carousing fill his time and he has concluded that marriage is not compatible with any of it. Gretchen Ames arrives from the poorhouse, which places her at the bottom of the local social order and gives her no household to fall back on, and the story turns on how the two of them negotiate from those unequal positions.

The setting supplies most of the story's constraints. A frontier community in this period has limited formal authority, and a woman without family in such a place depends on arrangements made with individual men, which is why the poorhouse background matters more than a mere detail of character. Leisure Books published this kind of historical romance in large quantities through the early 1990s, printed on inexpensive paper for a wide readership. The poorhouse is the detail that decides the story: Gretchen arrives without a family to negotiate for her, so the terms of any arrangement are set by the man who offers it.