In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

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 archetypcal 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.

Patricia Adam-Smith Lillian Hellman

Rosemary BrownDorothy Hewett

Kim CherninRobin Hyde

Shirley ChisholmDorothy Livesay

Lauris EdmondSally Morgan

Janet FrameGabrielle Roy