True North (Magill Book Reviews)

Jill Ker Conway’s first autobiographical volume, THE ROAD FROM COORAIN, ended with Conway, at age twenty-five, boarding a plane that would carry her away from her native Australia to her new home, the United States. TRUE NORTH begins when the plane lands, in a hurricane, in New York, and it follows Conway’s journey through graduate school at Harvard University, to teaching and administrative positions in Toronto, and concludes with her decision to accept the presidency of Smith College. Each leg of this journey offers Conway challenges which she accepts with equanimity and humor, believing, as she notes in the foreword, that her destiny is to “jump off the edge of the world into an unknowable future.”

At Harvard, Conway encounters graduate faculty and graduate students who stretch her intellectual and human capacities. Chief among these influences is the historian who becomes her husband, John Conway. A decorated Canadian war hero, John becomes her “true north,” her compass point guiding her as she determines what direction to pursue, both as an academician and as a human being. In Toronto, the Conways assume academic positions and also face a serious challenge: John’s illness results in his undergoing electric shock therapy. Surviving this difficulty, Jill Ker Conway also survives another potential obstacle, the political and labyrinthine ways of academe. When she assumes the position of vice president for internal affairs at the University of Toronto, she acknowledges the burden of juggling the multiple roles of professor, politician, and leader— roles which she likewise agrees to juggle when she accepts the presidency of Smith College.

The ending of TRUE NORTH echoes the ending of Conway’s first autobiography insofar as it is less a conclusion that a commencement. Traveling to her new home and job, Jill Ker Conway finishes her self-portrait by suggesting the ambivalence inherent in leave-takings and beginnings, those circular actions that originally compelled her to leave Australia and that continue to characterize the life story of a woman who has both a sense of her true north and her own independent vision.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XC, June 1, 1994, p. 1722.

Chicago Tribune. October 2, 1994, XIV, p. 5.

The Christian Science Monitor. August 22, 1994, p. 13.

Commonweal. CXXI, November 4, 1994, p. 34.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. July 31, 1994, p. 6.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, August 21, 1994, p. 11.

The New Yorker. LXX, October 10, 1994, p. 111.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, June 13, 1994, p. 54.

Smithsonian. XXV, December, 1994, p. 144.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, August 14, 1994, p. 3.