num_pages: 624
description: 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          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
language: English
title: In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States
titlecomplete: In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States
genres: Nonfiction, Biography
ratings_count: 31
publisher: Vintage