When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (First Edition)

Conway, Jill Ker

ISBN 10: 0679445935 / ISBN 13: 9780679445937

Published by Knopf, New York, 1998

About this Item

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. First edition. First printing. Hardcover. Quarter brown cloth over brown paper-covered boards with silver spine lettering. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Publisher's original price intact on jacket flap ($23.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A tight clean copy. Octavo, 209 pages, including index. A study of autobiography as a literary form, with particular attention to how men s and women s life narratives differ across history. Conway was the author of the bestselling memoir "The Road from Coorain" and served as president of Smith College.

Seller Inventory # Nonfiction-Memoir-Sale

Bibliographic Details

• Title: When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (First Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679445935
• ISBN 13: 9780679445937
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired  autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.
In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves.
Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity.
In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story.
Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

About the Author

Jill Ker Conway grew up in Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto and was vice president there before serving for ten years as president of Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a visiting scholar and professor in M.I.T.'s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In addition to her two memoirs, she has edited Written by Herself, two volumes of women's autobiographical writings.