The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Jill Ker Conway's True North, the second volume of her autobiography. We hope they will enrich your understanding of the many themes that Conway weaves into the narrative that begins where The Road from Coorain, the story of her childhood and early youth, ended. 

Conway begins this second volume with her departure from Australia and her ambivalent feelings toward the character and traditions of her native country. She settles temporarily in the United States and enters Radcliffe College as a graduate student in history, finding there, for the first time in her life, a community of intellectual women. Realizing that she has a true vocation as a historian, Conway develops her gifts as a thinker and educator. She marries John Conway, a fellow historian, and leaves with him for Canada, where she finds a teaching position at the University of Toronto. She eventually becomes a Vice President of the University, and while writing and researching the lives of activist women, she herself develops into an activist, fighting for improved opportunities and conditions for women in higher education. The narrative ends in 1974, with Conway about to begin a new job. As the first woman president of Smith College, she will work to defend the embattled tradition of the all-women's college in an era when coeducation has become widely accepted as the cultural ideal.