Ivy Days (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Susan Allen
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Time of Work: 1957-1963
- Setting: Ames, Iowa; Northampton and Boston, Massachusetts; England; and Berkeley, California
- Principal Characters: Susan Allen Toth, Chris Morgan, Mrs. Kurtz, Mr. Abernathy, Mrs. Stevens, Mr. Sheik
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir
- Subjects: 1950’s, Maturation or coming of age, 1960’s, Sex or sexuality, New England, College life, Women, Ambition, Colleges or universities, Students or student life, Learning or scholarship, Naivete
- Locales: Boston, MA, England, Berkeley, CA, Northampton, MA, Ames, IA
Form and Content
Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East is a wry first-person narrative that examines the impact on an innocent Iowan of attending Smith College, an elite woman’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. Toth scrutinizes the difficulties and doubts, largely unexamined at the time, that she faced as a scholarship student in highly competitive Lawrence House, where she lived while attending Smith from 1957 to 1961. An unsophisticated young woman from Ames, Iowa, a small town in a rural setting not far from Des Moines, she longed to see and experience the East...
[The entire page is 2168 words long]
