A Mind of My Own Book

In A Mind of My Own, Elisabeth Maxwell relates with candor her idyllic childhood and adolescence before the outbreak of World War II, the heady days of her courtship with the dashing Captain Maxwell in wartime Paris and all the passion of their love affair. She describes in detail his Jewish origins in a humble Czechoslovakian shtetl, the exploits of his war career in the British army, his rapid rise to fame and power in England and all the vicissitudes of his subsequent career. She depicts her role as the wife of a public figure as his global influence grew and the tragedies they endured together: her husband's own brush with death at the age of thirty-three, the death of a young daughter a few months later and that of their eldest son, Michael, after a seven-year-long coma. She speaks unflinchingly of the stresses she had to endure alone - Maxwell's early affair, his mounting oppression of the entire family, his ultimate estrangement from her and the aftermath of the collapse of his business empire. As harrowing as Elisabeth Maxwell's story is, it is also uplifting. She describes how she shook off the yoke of her husband's domination and her own self-doubt to attain a doctorate from Oxford University at the age of fifty; how she became an internationally recognized Holocaust scholar and how - in short - she nurtured a mind of her own. Her story will give courage to any woman who has ever suffered at the hands of a domineering man.