A Tribute to Marion Milner

Some five years or so ago, in the midst of a solid, icy Saturday morning, I looked out of the window at the raging blizzard and realized that there would be no Squiggle seminar on original themes in the work of D.W. Winnicott that morning. No one could possibly brave the snowstorm and come.

Ten minutes before the seminar was due to start - the roads as hard white as the sky was dark, the house empty of all but my husband and myself - the door-bell rang and in walked Marion accompanied by a terrified taxi-driver clinging on to her. The driver, looking imploringly at me, told me how he had tried to dissuade her from her journey. Marion, however, sailed into the house quite unperturbed and apparently unaware of our astonished misgivings. The driver did not know, of course, that he had had a tiger as passenger!

I had the sublime good fortune to count Marion as a beloved friend for only 20 years. I am aware there are many others here who knew her well long before I was born.

I knew her - or felt I did - perhaps 10 years before meeting her when I first read her work, experiencing something that never really changed for me, even after coming to know her years later.

Here was a visionary whose lambent prose and visceral imagination distilled all that was dense, diffuse and seemingly beyond representation into a form that could be embraced with wonder, fear and deep excitement. You needed to read only one line to know that this was Marion Milner's work.

She was fired by an intellectual discipline and an artistic sensibility of such rare mettle that allowed her writing to rise, descend and intermingle in such conjunctions that it became infused with that pellucid fire which inhabits the work of the great mystics.

And yet what more fully embodied a being could there have been than her! Her distinctive elegance, her luminous beauty - vivid until the end - calls to mind her own words when writing about the inter-relation between what the eye saw and what flooded up from within - ‘a wa