The Road from Coorain

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Jill Ker Conway

Biography & Memoir

Jul 31, 2018

Jill Ker Conway’s account of her coming-of-age in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century is a deft evocation of landscape and memory. Through those two dimensions a small girl grows, against cultural and familial odds, into a determined young woman on the verge of a voyage to America, where she will pursue her aspirations as a historian and, ultimately, achieve renown as the first female president of Smith College. In the pages of this moving book, we witness a destiny discovering itself, as it would in a nineteenth-century novel. In fact, throughout Conway’s narrative, a reader can’t help but think of Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and wonder if this is the sort of autobiography Dorothea might have penned if she had not had such an accomplished novelist to tell her tale.

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