Jill Ker Conway Critical Essay | Critical Review by Madeline Marget

Critical Review by Madeline Marget

SOURCE: “A Woman of Parts,” in Commonweal, Vol. 121, No. 19, November 4, 1994, pp. 34–35.

In the following review, Marget offers a mixed assessment of True North, faulting the book for covering too much material and being overly ambitious.

This second volume [True North] of Jill Ker Conway's memoirs is an instructive, and often vivid, travelogue of her experience, and of her knowledge and ideas. It begins where The Road from Coorain left off, at the time of the author's leaving Australia for the United States in 1960, and ends in 1975, as she is about to assume the presidency of Smith College. The decade-and-a-half she writes about was an intense time for the contemporary women's movement, and a period of striking development and change in Conway's life. The huge amount of material it encompasses is both the strength of the book and its weakness.

Conway's subject is her...
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