Jill Ker Conway's Books

The Road from Coorain

By: Jill Ker Conway

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In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency. We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.

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Page Count

258

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797309

ISBN 13

9780307797308

True North

A Memoir

By: Jill Ker Conway

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True North

A Memoir

By: Jill Ker Conway

True North is the inspirational Canadian Chapter of Jill Ker Conway's life story, which began with her much love, bestselling memoir, The Road from Coorain. Beginning with her departure from Australia, Jill Ker Conway tells of her romance with Harvard House Master John Conway, of coming to grips with his manic-depressive disorder, and of their move to Canada in 1964 where she became the first female vice-president at the University of Toronto. In this vibrant memoir, we watch as a most private woman makes of herself a public persona in Canada.

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797333

ISBN 13

9780307797339

A Woman's Education

By: Jill Ker Conway

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A Woman's Education

By: Jill Ker Conway

The acclaimed author of the best-selling The Road from Coorain and True North now gives us the third book in her remarkable continuing memoir—describing the pleasures, the challenges, and the constant surprises (good and bad) of her years as the first woman president of Smith College. The story opens in 1973 as Conway, unbeknownst to her, is first “looked over” as a prospective candidate by members of the Smith community, and continues as she assesses her passions and possibilities and agrees to the new challenge of heading the college in 1975. The jolt of energy she gets from being surrounded by several thousand young women enables her to take on the difficulties that arise in dealing with the diverse Smith constituencies—from the self-appointed protectors of the great male tradition of humanistic learning to the equally determined young feminists insisting on change. We see Conway juggling the needs and concerns of faculty, students, parents, trustees, and alumnae, and re-defining and redesigning aspects of the college to create programs in line with the new realities of women’s lives. We sense the urgency of her efforts to shape an institution that will attract students of the 1990s and beyond. Through it all we see Jill Ker Conway coping with her husband’s illness, and learning to protect and sustain her inner self. As the end of a decade at Smith approaches, we see her realizing that she has both had her education and made her contributions, and that it is time now for her to graduate.

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Page Count

159

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797341

ISBN 13

9780307797346

In Her Own Words

Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

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In Her Own Words

Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the United States, which is now her home. In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women−from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the post-colonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference−by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing. Patricia Adam-Smith Lillian Hellman Rosemary Brown Dorothy Hewett Kim Chernin Robin Hyde Shirley Chisholm Dorothy Livesay Lauris Edmond Sally Morgan Janet Frame Gabrielle Roy

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Page Count

625

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797244

ISBN 13

9780307797247

A Woman's Education

By: Jill K. Conway

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A Woman's Education

By: Jill K. Conway

Conway opens with her assessment of her life, passions, possibilities and the making of her decision to leave Canada and return to the United States to become Smith's first woman president. Settling into her new environment, she is at once struck by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley and the Olmstead-designed Smith campus - but also by the College's financial problems and a quarrelsome and complaining faculty engaged in disputes and trivial lawsuits. The jolt of energy she gets from being in the presence of several thousand young women enables her to take on the various Smith constituencies: the self-appointed custodians of the great western male tradition of humanistic learning, the puzzled liberals, the younger male feminists, the 'lady scholars doing intellectual petitpoint', and the young committed feminists of all stripes. We see her harnessing the negative energies in more positive directions, redefining and redesigning parts of the institution, strategising, positioning herself and building a political base, introducing feminist scholarship into the curriculum, creating a programme for older students and a funded research centre, adding fields of study and athletic programmes, developing strong career counselling, changing investment strategy, increasing the endowment - and, in general, mobilising the institution to share the urgency she felt for shaping the kind of women's institution that would attract the students of the '90s and beyond. Through it all we see her continuing to cope with her husband John's ill health and learning to protect and sustain her inner self in the quiet solitude of gardening at their country home - a North American variant of the solitude of her native Australian plains. As the end of the Smith decade approaches she reviews what she has learned and decides that she has had her education and that it is time to 'graduate'.

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Page Count

143

Published Date

ISBN 10

009957991X

ISBN 13

9780099579915

When Memory Speaks

Exploring the Art of Autobiography

By: Jill Ker Conway

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When Memory Speaks

Exploring the Art of Autobiography

By: Jill Ker Conway

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives. In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity. In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story. Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

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Page Count

225

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797236

ISBN 13

9780307797230

The Road from Coorain

By: Jill Ker Conway

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The Road from Coorain

By: Jill Ker Conway

The first woman president of Smith College recalls her Australian outback childhood and her climb into North American academia

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Page Count

403

Publisher

Macmillan Reference USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816152047

ISBN 13

9780816152049

True North

A Memoir

By: Jill K. Conway

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True North

A Memoir

By: Jill K. Conway

In 1960 Jill Ker Conway arrived in America from Australia. This sequel to The Road from Coorain tells of her gradual acclimatization to the new continent; her discovery of the world of intellectual, energetic women; her romance and marriage to John Conway, a war hero and Harvard housemaster; and their year-long European honeymoon, during which she came to grips with the reality of John's manic-depressive disorder, as well as the lingering, poisonous anger of her mother.

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Page Count

250

Published Date

ISBN 10

009947901X

ISBN 13

9780099479017

In Her Own Words

Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

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In Her Own Words

Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

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Page Count

625

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307797244

ISBN 13

9780307797247

Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

The author of On Writing Well presents stories and advice on the writing process from Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and many more. For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs—or is thinking about writing one—this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors: Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson. “Annie Dillard talks of her Pittsburgh childhood and her moment of waking to the world outside. Russell Baker explains why his first draft of Growing Up was so bad that he had to start over again. Alfred Kazin finds that writing about his Brooklyn childhood connected him with the great tradition of Emerson and Whitman. Toni Morrison tells why her fiction uses not only family history but the slave narratives of her people. Lewis Thomas traces the evolution of his singular self from primeval bacteria to contemporary scientist whose drive to be useful is the most fundamental of all biological necessities. . . . Delightful and instructive.” —Library Journal

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Page Count

237

Publisher

HMH

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547527454

ISBN 13

9780547527451

Written by Herself: Volume I

Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology

By: Jill Ker Conway

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Written by Herself: Volume I

Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology

By: Jill Ker Conway

The bestselling author of The Road from Coorain presents an extraordinarily powerful anthology of the autobiographical writings of 25 women, literary predecessors and contemporaries that include Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurst, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Glasgow, Maya Angelou, Sara Josephine Baker, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

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Page Count

690

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679736336

ISBN 13

9780679736332

Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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237

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HMH

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547527454

ISBN 13

9780547527451

Written by Herself: Volume 2

Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

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Written by Herself: Volume 2

Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States

By: Jill Ker Conway

In this powerful new collection, the author of two of the most celebrated memoirs in recent years presents the autobiographical writings of 14 of her English-speaking predecessors and contemporaries. The women who tell their stories in Written By Herself, Vol. II represent three generations, four continents, and a range of experience that is equaled only by the diversity with which they transform life into literature. Here are England's Vera Brittain, commemorating the deaths of the men she loved in the carnage of World War I; Emma Mashinini, who endured imprisonment and torture as a labor organizer in South Africa; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the daughter of Indian aristocracy who became an architect of her country's independence; and Edith Mirante, the wisecracking American whose passion for justice took her to the opium trails of Burma. Collected in this stirring volume, their voices demonstrate the ways in which women strive for power, inclusion, and autonomy-- and never fail to move, inspire, and instruct us. Contributors include: Margery Perham,Isak Dinesen,Shudha Mazumdar,Vivian Gornick, Vera Brittain, Elspeth Huxley, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Angelica Garnett, Emma Mashinini, Meena Alexander, Edith Mirante, Mary Benson, and Ruth First.

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