There is a clarity, elegance, and beauty to Conway's Road to Coorain that places it firmly at the apogee of autobiography along with such masterpieces as West With the Night by Beryl Markham, or An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard. From the first sentence, you will be drawn inexorably into the story of her childhood in New South Wales, Australia, and her gradual discovery of--and by--the larger world: the clarity of Conway's language satisfies like cold clear water after a day in the desert: the rhythm of her sentences has a timelessness and expansiveness akin to the Australian landscape itself. This is very likely a book you will remember the rest of your life. Highly Recommended.


From Publishers Weekly
At age 11, Conway ( Women Reformers and American Culture ) left the arduous life on her family's sheep farm in the Australian outback for school in war-time Sydney, burdened by an emotionally dependent, recently widowed mother. A lively curiosity and penetrating intellect illuminate this unusually objective account of the author's progress from a solitary childhood--the most appealing part of the narrative--to public achievement as president of Smith College and now professor at MIT. Gifted with an ability to adapt to a wide range of cultures and people and despite ingrained Australian prejudice against intellectuals, Conway devoted herself to the study of history and literature, spurred on by excellent British-style schooling. Her further adventures could easily make a rewarding second volume. Paperback rights to Vintage; QPBC alternate. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Conway spent her first 11 years in the windswept grasslands of Australia, where her father owned 30,000 acres of arid land. Though his ability to understand the land was extensive, an eight-year drought finally defeated him, and he comitted suicide. A few years later, Conway's oldest brother died in an automobile accident. The two deaths plunged her mother into depression. Out of this tale of hard work, drought, and sorrow, Conway emerges with character and personal strength. From the University of Sydney, she went on to study history at Harvard and eventually became the first woman president of Smith College. This inspiring book tells in full the details of her life and thoughts up to the time she left for America. Quality Paperback Book Club selection.- Judith Nixon, Purdue Univ. Libs., W. Lafayette, Ind.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


John Kenneth Galbraith
A small masterpiece of scene, memory, and very stylish English. I've been several times to Australia; this book was the most rewarding journey of all.


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kate Boris-Brown
In her autobiography, Jill Ker Conway writes that as a child she sought refuge from the adult concerns and duties of her life by retiring to her swing in the eucalyptus grove. There she "would kick furiously in order to rise up higher and see a little farther beyond the horizon." The Road From Coorain describes Jill Ker Conway's life until the age of twenty-three when she leaves Australia for graduate school at Harvard University and a life of academic honor, including her role as the first woman president of Smith College. Dr. Conway is a historian by training as well as by nature. Her chronicle of her growth as she moves from an isolated childhood on a drought-ridden sheep ranch to the center of crowded, confusing urban life in Sydney is told with careful attention to each emerging step of the journey. Her path to independent womanhood winds around, between, and over the boulders of death and loss in her family. Her father dies when she is a still a child; her mother, unable to cope, suffers from alcoholism and depression. Raised with British attitudes that essentially ignored the reality of her native Australian culture, it is only in college that Jill Ker Conway comes to recognize the necessity of studying her country as an independent entity. Her personal evolution comes to mirror her academic life as she realizes that she, too, must claim her independence from her mother and familial responsibilities. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


Review
"The Road from Coorain is a small masterpiece of scene, memory, and very stylish English. I've been several times to Australia; this book was the most rewarding journey of all."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"This beautifully written narrative of Conway's journey from a girlhood on an isolated sheep-farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College) is both new and universal. If few of us have known an eight-year drought in New South Wales, many of us have felt the despair of an ambitious young woman facing a constrained female destiny. This book, an extraordinarily gripping and inspiring work, will take its place as one of the few heroic stories of girlhood.


Book Description
From the shelter of a protective family, to the lessons of tragedy and independence, this is an indelible portrait of a harsh and beautiful country and the inspiring story of a remarkable woman's life.

ANNOTATION

From the shelter of a protective family to the lessons of tragedy and independence this is an indelible portrait of a remarkable woman's life.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Verlyn Klinkenborg

In ''The Road From Coorain,'' one fire starts another. The author's predicament as a woman in Australia becomes a measure of Australia's predicament in the British Empire....''The Road From Coorain'' is the work of a writer who relentlessly tugs at the cultural fences around her until they collapse, leaving her solitary under an immense Australian sky, enlarged to herself at last. What emerges most clearly from this book is the depth of Jill Ker Conway's feeling for ''the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level''. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly

At age 11, Conway ( Women Reformers and American Culture ) left the arduous life on her family's sheep farm in the Australian outback for school in war-time Sydney, burdened by an emotionally dependent, recently widowed mother. A lively curiosity and penetrating intellect illuminate this unusually objective account of the author's progress from a solitary childhood--the most appealing part of the narrative--to public achievement as president of Smith College and now professor at MIT. Gifted with an ability to adapt to a wide range of cultures and people and despite ingrained Australian prejudice against intellectuals, Conway devoted herself to the study of history and literature, spurred on by excellent British-style schooling. Her further adventures could easily make a rewarding second volume. Paperback rights to Vintage; QPBC alternate. (May)

Library Journal