Les contributions littéraires de Jill Ker Conway sont principalement ancrées dans ses récits autobiographiques introspectifs. Elle explore avec maestria les thèmes de l'identité, de la transformation personnelle et du voyage de découverte de soi. Son écriture offre un regard profond sur les défis et les opportunités rencontrés par les femmes face aux changements sociétaux. Le travail de Conway offre une lentille unique pour comprendre la croissance individuelle dans un contexte historique plus large.
The collection features autobiographical writings from 14 influential English-speaking women, spanning three generations and four continents. Each contributor shares her unique experiences, showcasing a remarkable diversity in storytelling that transforms personal narratives into compelling literature. This powerful anthology highlights the voices of women who have shaped contemporary memoir writing, offering a rich tapestry of perspectives and insights.
Focusing on women's autobiographical writing, the book presents a curated selection of experiences from the British Commonwealth, juxtaposed with significant themes in women's lives in the United States. Jill Ker Conway, a renowned memoirist, expertly distills these narratives, highlighting the diverse voices and perspectives of women. This anthology serves as a powerful exploration of identity, culture, and the shared experiences that shape women's lives across different contexts.
Focusing on her transformative decade as the first female president of Smith College, the narrative explores challenges in reinventing women's education while balancing personal demands. The author reflects on her journey, highlighting significant experiences and the evolution of women's roles in academia during her tenure. This continuation of her autobiography offers insights into leadership, resilience, and the pursuit of educational equity.
Exploring the nuances of modern memoir, Jill Ker Conway delves into the distinct forms and styles that characterize this genre. She highlights the contrasting approaches men and women take in understanding and presenting their life stories, providing insightful reflections on gender perspectives in autobiographical writing. Conway's analysis offers a compelling look at how personal narratives are shaped by societal influences and individual experiences.
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.
En este relato autobiográfico, Jill Ker Conway narra su largo recorrido, vital e intelectual, desde su Australia natal hasta la Universidad de Harvard. Su brillante recorrido académico como historiadora no tarda en tocar techo, en un ambiente poco proclive a la igualdad de derechos de la mujer en el ámbito intelectual y laboral. En Harvard conoce a quien será su marido, un prestigioso profesor universitario, con quien se trasladará a Toronto. Allí no tarda en ser nombrada vicerrectora de la universidad, en un ambiente en que el que apenas hay precedentes de mujeres en las tareas intelectuales y de gobierno. También allí van a buscarla desde Estados Unidos, para que inicie una nueva etapa como primera mujer rectora del Smith College, el mayor del país, exclusivamente femenino.
