Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology

Jill Ker Conway (The Road from Coorain ) edits this sterling selection of autobiographical excerpts by 25 American women. Among them are artists, scientists, doctors, writers, and reformers, all well chosen though not necessarily well known. Physician Anne Walter Fearn writes of decades dispensing Western medicine in China and struggling with her husband, a God-fearing medical missionary who was "born to give orders just as definitely as I was born not to take them." The heart-rending narrative of former slave Harriet Ann Jacob, who tells of abortive and finally successful attempts to free herself and her children segues into Maya Angelou's more widely read contemporary account of doggedly soliciting sex as a teen uncertain of her sexual identity and hoping to be ushered into "that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity."