{"title":"Jill K Conway","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"road-from-coorain-book-jill-k-conway-9780394574561","title":"The Road from Coorain","description":"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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585602789649,"sku":"GOR007390159","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49653933113617,"sku":"GOR006612759","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038243655953,"sku":"CIN0394574567A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50171111538961,"sku":"CIN0394574567G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50275505537297,"sku":"CIN0394574567VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51864837914897,"sku":"GOR003199107","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0394574567.jpg?v=1751165655"},{"product_id":"when-memory-speaks-book-jill-k-conway-9780679445937","title":"When Memory Speaks","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003eIn 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. \u003cbr\u003eConway 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.\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003eThroughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us toenter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives. \u003cp\u003eFrom the Hardcover edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49651025445137,"sku":"GOR005660118","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49950708105489,"sku":"CIN0679445935G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50184189706513,"sku":"CIN0679445935VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50717683253521,"sku":"GOR006272997","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51329622606097,"sku":"CIN0679445935A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0679445935.jpg?v=1751041032"},{"product_id":"written-by-herself-book-jill-k-conway-9780099386711","title":"Written by Herself","description":"From Harriet Jacobs and Jane Addams to Gloria Steinem and Maxine Hong Kingston, 25 American women tell the stories of their lives. Jill Ker Conway, author of \"The Road from Coorain\", presents these autobiographical writings by her literary predecessors and contemporaries in a volume that reflects the range of American women's experiences in the last 150 years. Whether the narrator is the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs or the Southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, the anthropologist Margaret Mead or the feminist reformer Margaret Sanger, the voices are resonant in their passion and unflinching in their quest for self-awareness. Also included are pieces by Anna Howard Shaw, Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, Margaret Floy Washburn, Anne Walter Fearn, Anna Louise Strong, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, Maya Angelou, S.Josephine Baker, Margaret Morse Nice, Lucy Larcom, Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Zora Neal Hurston, Hortense Powdermaker, Janet Scudder, Margaret Bourke-White, Marian Anderson, Vida Dutton Scudder and Louise Bogan.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50344558428433,"sku":"CIN0099386712A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099386712.jpg?v=1750876381"},{"product_id":"road-from-coorain-book-jill-k-conway-9780749303600","title":"The Road from Coorain","description":"In this memoir the author describes her isolated childhood in the Australian outback. She became her father's farmhand, and when he died prematurely, she moved to Sydney, aged 11 years, and had to learn to adapt to a new and alien set of rules. Later she started drinking under the stress of looking after a depressive mother, then became involved in intellectual university life and began a reassessment of the political, cultural and spiritual ideas she had been brought up with. Eventually she became a successful career woman.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51606164275473,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51606164668689,"sku":"GOR010203067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51834033438993,"sku":"GOR004952305","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52770685813009,"sku":"GOR003451447","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53499998929169,"sku":"CIN0749303603VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53582150598929,"sku":"CIN0749303603G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0749303603.jpg?v=1750785225"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-jill-k-conway.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}