The Story of My Life Summary

 

The Story of My Life was written while Helen Keller, then in  her early twenties, was a student at Radcliffe College. It is a moving  story of the education of a child with the extreme handicap of being  deaf and blind. The book begins with a rather vague description of young  Helen’s earliest memories, before she became deaf and blind at the age  of nineteen months, but most of it narrates her teaching by Anne  Sullivan of the Perkins Institute for the Blind. 

  The Story of My Life is far from the cry for help that it  might easily have been. The tone is one of joy. Keller emphasizes her  early love of language. She recalls learning to speak before she lost  her ability to see or hear and her desperate attempts to reawaken this  ability. Throughout the book, there is a strong emphasis on her love of  language, especially the written word, which was, after all, one of the  few ways she had of relating to the outside world.  

   The major emphasis of A Story of My Life is on the work of  Sullivan, whom Helen always in this book refers to as Teacher. As  subsequent writings made clearer, Sullivan’s methods were far from  orthodox at the time. She communicated with Helen mostly by use of the  manual alphabet, although lip-reading with fingers was also attempted.  At the time, oral communication was almost universally stressed among  educators of deaf children.

     When this book was written, Keller had already published a few  articles and was doing well at Radcliffe (she was graduated with honors  in 1904). Keller makes it clear that she cannot speak intelligibly, and  stresses that she probably never will. In fact, when Keller became a  social activist later in life, she made a number of attempts to improve  her speech, although her double disability made this difficult. After  her graduation, she was regularly accompanied by Sullivan on lecture  tours. Sullivan acted as an interpreter as well as an additional speaker  on educational methods. 

  The Story of My Life is a tale of triumph over difficulties  that would be insurmountable to most children. Keller went on to become a  noted author, speaker, and political activist, advocating human rights  for people not only with physical disabilities but also with social  problems. Many of her later works were largely autobiographical, but  there was always an emphasis on the inherent power of the individual to  journey through life with hope. The Story of My Life is the first chapter in such a journey.