True North.

This second volume of Jill Ker Conway's memoirs is an instructive, and often vivid, travelogue of her experience, and of her knowledge and ideas. It begins where The Road from Coorain left off, at the time of the author's leaving Australia for the United States in 1960, and ends in 1975, as she is about to assume the presidency of Smith College. The decade-and-a-half she writes about was an intense time for the contemporary women's movement, and a period of striking development and change in Conway's life. The huge amount of material it encompasses is both the strength of the book and its weakness.

Conway's subject is her life and the lives of women who, like her, have had to move beyond their sphere and training to realize their high ambitions. Her thesis, first explored in her doctoral dissertation, is that successful women use direct, complex, well-thought-out methods for achieving their goals, but that when they report on their achievements they often, even habitually, disguise what is likely to be the socially unacceptable sight of their drive and planning, thereby falsifying to other people, and perhaps to themselves, the means of their accomplishments.

Oddly, however, Conway attributes many of the positive turns in her own life to serendipity. She meets and charms one of Canada's greatest philanthropists because she happens to sit next to him at a party; she does not anticipate how timely and popular her choice to center her scholarship on women would be and is surprised at the attention she receives. Adding to the unreality is her representation of people she likes as essentially flawless. They are witty, kind, exceptionally bright, talented, and generous--never the cause of their own, or anyone else's, misfortune. Similarly, Conway's choices are almost always wise, and her conduct is not only irreproachable, but highly admirable. I believe that in her self-portrait, at least, she is accurate--she once took considerable trouble to do a favor for me, a complete stranger--but the unalleviated virtue of her story and her companions left me wondering what enlightenment a fuller rendering of dark times, and especially of the struggle against them, might have given.

Nevertheless, her portraits of the events, settings, and people in her life radiate her own happiness, and yield clear, memorable views. When she arrives in Cambridge to begin her graduate work at Harvard she immediately (and luckily, in her telling) meets women who are to become life-long friends, and with whom she shares a vigorous, secure, intellectual, and emotional life. Before long, she meets her future husband, an erudite, sophisticated scholar and war hero, and after a passionate courtship, marries him. The wedding is romantic and elegant; the year-long working honeymoon is in England and Italy. After that, there are jobs for both of them in Toronto.

In her personal life as an adult, Conway has suffered three major--and on-going--blows. Her husband John suffers from severe depression that at least once required a long hospitalization. Conway says that she marks her maturity from the time when she discovered that despite her great love for him--he is her compass, the "true north" of the title--she could be only a companion, not a cure, for him.

Though she had not wanted to marry until she met John (and says she did not think of marrying him until he asked), once married she did long for children. She was unable to have them, however, because she suffered from endometriosis, so severe that she was wracked with pain each month--pain that Australian doctors had dismissed as psychosomatic, a result of her unmarried, childless state.

Her third serious problem was also an outgrowth, at least in part, of sexism. Conway's mother, an energetic, intelligent woman, wholly admirable in the first half of The Road from Coorain, becomes almost evil--bitter, idle, self-centered, and consumed by a desire to own her children. Though in True North she doesn't succeed in breaking their marriages or careers in her effort to possess Conway and her brother, she'd like to. Grief (at the loss of her husband and son) and perhaps character play a part in the transformation of her personality, but the idle, mannered, often chemically tranquilized conditions of an upper-middle-class woman's life in a conservative society are the great cause of harm to her, and through her, to her family. The contrast between the damage her repressed energy does, and the good Conway's actions do, is the most important lesson of the book.

There are others. When her activities are clearly political, especially when they're conducted to advance her career, Conway tells how she did it in straight-forward, educational terms. When she realizes that she's not being promoted or paid as her male peers at the University of Toronto are, she takes quick and effective steps to gain justice. She stands up for order in student demonstrations, constructs a course on women, learns a compelling extemporaneous lecturing style, helps other women gain support and advance, and becomes an effective administrator through cool thinking, hard work, and clear ethics. Most of the time she gives enough detail so it would be possible to follow her path--if one had her energy and intelligence (and, maybe, a little of her luck).

The book is too brisk, though, to adequately do justice to Conway's thinking or her eye. The many conclusions in True North come too quickly, as if Conway already--and off-stage--has participated in disputatious discussion and is now the only one left talking. In her academic and administrative work, and in the other books she's written for a general audience, Conway's done much good. The observation and instruction in True North are part of that accomplishment, but more, or more open, reflection and introspection would make the worlds she presents to readers more accessible. I hope Conway's future work not only continues the life she writes about in this book, but also enlarges on it.