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

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This latest collection of women’s memoirs edited by Jill Ker Conway is
taken from the writing of 12 women from four countries: Patricia
Adam-Smith, Dorothy Hewett, and Sally Morgan of Australia; Robin Hyde,
Janet Frame, and Lauris Edmond of New Zealand; Dorothy Livesay,
Gabrielle Roy, and Rosemary Brown of Canada; and Lillian Hellman,
Shirley Chisholm, and Kim Chernin of the United States. Most of the
women are successful writers, and all but one were born in the first
half of the 20th century. As Conway states in her thoughtful
introduction, memoirs are “social documents as well as literary
texts,”; indeed, in these pages the social story takes precedence as
we learn much about the political climate in which these women lived.

The many ellipses in the texts allow a full story to be told but
perhaps disallow a complete absorption of the literary flavor of the
writer. Two poets, Lauris Edmond and Kim Chernin, do lift emotion off
the page with their respective tales of isolation in 1950s marriages and
the painful break with parents over their Communist ideals. Other
stories touch on universal subjects such as poverty and prejudice, while
still others deal with more personal matters such as the search for
family, the struggle with mental illness, or the widespread malaise
among creative artists who cannot conform to the society into which they
are born.

Running through the book is the sense of isolation many of these women
felt. How they overcame this obstacle is at the heart of their stories.