Penguin Books, 1979
Copyright Florida Scott Maxwell, 1968.
In 1968, at the age of 85, Florida Scott-Maxwell published an autobiographical notebook. An American-born playwright, a Jungian psychologist, and a suffragist, Scott-Maxwell lived much of her life in Scotland and England, and may therefore be less known in the U.S. The Measure of My Days, widely read by those interested in exploring the feelings of the elderly, and by those interested in autobiographical writings, has perhaps received more attention from gerontologists than readers of literature.
Scott-Maxwell writes in the notebook of aging, of vulnerability and passion for life, of being faced with imminent death, and of facing emotional as well as physical pain, which she describes as lacerating. She laments that among the many losses faced by the aging is the loss of position in a society that is reeling out of control, plummeting toward technological takeover, and that she fears is swallowing individuality. She fiercely defends the importance of individual consciousness, while recognizing individuals are responsible to society. She insists on fealty to the awakening consciousness, and believes it is through this ascent to spiritual awareness a woman recognizes she has lived dutifully and fully.
Neither dark nor particularly humorous, and certainly more abstract than anecdotal, Scott-Maxwell nonetheless describes herself in one passage as she dances in her kitchen while the kettle is coming to a boil. It is a brief delightful passage in which she reckons that had she lived during the previous century she might have been wearing a long black dress and carrying a cane with which to "rap, rap, rap" on the floor. Instead, she says, she eases her "crabbed heart" by writing the notebook.
Make no mistake, though. This is an intimate, candid, and rare rendering of a wise-woman's observations on important issues and profound feelings.
