In I Passed This Way, Sylvia Ashton-Warner writes of her "innate disposition to become other people … their feeling became my feeling contagiously." As an educator she had the ability to listen to her students and to elicit their deepest concerns. Now, in her autobiography, she is both listener and voice, drawing freely on memory and feeling to illuminate her life and work. (p. 32)

The remarkable strength of her inner life shows itself even in the shaping of her autobiography. She concentrates on feelings and personal growth, on family and important friendships rather than external events. Though she writes of the period from 1908 through 1978, there is little mention of both world wars, and only briefly of the Depression as it separates her family. She does not describe the births of her children or the death of her mother. Nor does she discuss most of her students individually, or detail...