Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain. The Road from Coorain traces the unlikely story of young Jill Ker’s journey from a sheep station in the western grasslands of New South Wales, Australia, to the position of president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Journeys of such epic proportions are rare even for the increasingly ubiquitous genre of memoir. But the young Jill – hemmed in by the extreme drudgery of sheep farming, the tedium of the dry, parched landscape of the Australian outback, and later by the emotional demands of her widowed mother, who had relocated the family to Sydney – dreams big dreams. From the family’s 30,000-acre property known as Coorain, a place so isolated that she was seven before she saw another girl child, Jill Ker travels first with her family to Sydney, then on her own to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to earn a PhD at Harvard University. Though Jill Ker Conway’s most public triumph comes in her becoming the first woman to be named presiden