[Bookpossum]

I would like to nominate The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. From a review by Carolyn Heilbrun:

This beautifully written narrative of Conway's journey from a girlhood on an isolated sheep farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the Presidency of Smith College) is both new and universal. If few of us have known an eight-year drought in New South Wales, many of us have felt the despair of an ambitious young woman facing a constrained female destiny. This book, an extraordinarily gripping and inspiring work, will take its place as one of the few heroic stories of girlhood.