[4][7] She attended Brigham Young University, where she met her first husband, Frederick C. Sorensen, who taught English at a local high school.

[8] Sorensen and Waugh lived primarily in Morocco but moved back to the states when Alec's health began to fail in 1980.

[16] In On This Star, Erik Eriksen fails entirely, and his story ends in death, showing that Sorensen believed it was impossible to reintegrate with Mormon society once one becomes involved with the outside world.

[17] In The Evening and the Morning, Kate Alexander returns to her hometown of Manti, Utah, after being shunned for pursuing an affair with a married man and giving birth to a daughter.

Kate attempts to pursue this romance when she discovers his wife is dead, but finds that he is unwilling to love her in the same way, once again showing the protagonist failing to reintegrate into Mormon culture despite her hope that it was possible.

He admits that he holds different types of love for both of them, and eventually Mette is the one to approach Zina about becoming a plural wife, despite this story occurring after the 1890 Manifesto.

[20] Sorensen also emphasized the complexities of life, and her novels caution against thinking in absolutes,[21] along with how religion closely tied to community can effect outsiders.

In On This Star, Sorensen uses the Eriksen family and Erik to differentiate between the duty that comes with blind faith and true desire.

Because of Mercy's opposition to blind faith, Dallimore says that she "[represents] a kind of spiritual life that is opposed to the spirit of religion".

The female protagonists in Sorensen's novels (specifically Mercy Baker, Zina Johnson, and Kate Alexander) are faced with discovering or coming to terms with their identities in male-dominated societies.

[31] Rather, according to her biographer Stephen Carter, she focuses on clashing worldviews in the lens of what is called "lantern consciousness", a term coined by Alison Gopnik.

As the children learn more about the differing worldviews, they are caught in a middle ground, where adults in their lives want them to remain ignorant in other beliefs or lifestyles.

[34] As a regionalist author, Sorensen primarily drew inspiration from the places where she was living and often based her characters directly on people she knew or had met.

[2][14] Her first book for children, Curious Missy, grew out of her efforts helping her county in Alabama obtain a bookmobile,[8] and her 1957 Newbery Medal-winning Miracles on Maple Hill was based in the Erie, Pennsylvania, region where she lived at that time.

Sorensen lived during this change, and she wrote her novels as a way to deal with the unanswered questions of how the convergence of the world and Mormonism effected people at this time.

[37] England considered these stories as an example of Sorensen's ability to combine personal experiences and emotional insights, which strengthened her skills as both an essayist and fiction writer.

[39] Stephen Carter praised Sorensen for her use of "the poetic language, the emotional insight, the ethnographic eye, the gripping story", which is visible in all of her novels, but especially apparent in Many Heavens.

"[48] In the University of Utah student newspaper, Virginia Sorensen was described as "a gifted novelist whose wise and sensitive books have grown out of first-hand observations of the American scene in a variety of regions".

[32] Stephen Carter says that "Virginia's focus on (and skill at producing) these transporting passages of lantern consciousness comes at the expense of her plots".