In her own words - Jill Ker Conway

Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the United States, which is now her home.

In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women-from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the postcolonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference-by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing.

Includes writing from:


Patricia Adam-Smith
Lillian Hellman

Rosemary Brown
Dorothy Hewett

Kim Chernin
Robin Hyde

Shirley Chisholm
Dorothy Livesay

Lauris Edmond
Sally Morgan

Janet Frame
Gabrielle Roy