Continuing from her memoir "The Road From Coorain', the author tells of her life after moving to the US at age 25.

True North: A Memoir

Jill Ker Conway

Biographies & Memoirs

Alfred.A. Knopf

Conway's The Road from Coorain presents a vivid memoir of coming of age in Australia. In 1960, however, she had reached the limits of that provincial--and irredeemably sexist--society and set off for America. True North--the testament of an extraordinary woman living in an extraordinary time--te lls the profound story of the challenges that confronted Conway, as she sought to establish her public self.

True North - the Sequel to the Bestselling the Road from Coorain

Vintage Book / Random House

A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College

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'.

Politics & Social Sciences

Women's Studies

Random House Pod

When Rosemary Stubbs embarks on her new career as a chaplain at a New England women's college, she quickly finds herself ensnared in a mystery. She found herself on a circular stair that led down into a great sunken theater, the stair opening onto a concrete catwalk around four huge cylinders that rested on a level four feet below. The heat was intense, and a living, roaring noise surrounded her. ―From Overnight Float

Overnight Float: A Mystery (Rosemary Stubbs Mysteries)

Literature & Fiction

Clare Munnings

Elizabeth Kennan

United States

W.W.Norton&Company

True North is the compelling and inspirational Canadian chapter of Jill Ker Conway's life story which began with her much loved memoir THE ROAD FROM COORAIN. As vivid and graceful as the recollections of her childhood, True North begins with Jill Ker Conway's departure from Australia and arrival in Boston. We witness her romance and marriage to Canadian war hero and Harvard housemaster John Conway, and their yearlong European honeymoon during which she comes to grips with the reality of his manic-depression and the lingering, destructive anger of her Mother. Following their sojourn in Europe, Jill Ker Conway and her husband moved to Toronto, where she began a highly successful and innovative tenure as a professor at the University of Toronto, becoming its first female vice-president. Throughout True North, she shares her sense of the Canadian landscape, as powerful and mystical as any of her feelings about Australia, and her astute and perceptive thoughts about the Canadian cultural milieu of the time. We watch in this vibrant memoir, as a most private person finds for herself a public persona in Canada. This is the story moving and enriching, of a woman's education - and education not only of the mind but of the heart and of the spirit.

Memoirs

The Road From Coorain

Community & Culture

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Books by Jill Ker Conway