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‘This is a remarkable and, I think, important book,’ wrote the poet W. H. Auden in applauding the 34-year-old psychologist Marion Milner's first book, A Life of One's Own. ‘One day she realised that she was unhappy and decided to do something about it’ by ‘catching the wandering thought of the moment and putting it into words,’ Auden continued. ‘Often, when vaguely bored in a restaurant or the street, it would be enough to say, for instance: “That man looks like a pig”, and at once I would find he had become alive,’ Auden quoted by way of illustration (Auden, 1934, pp. viii, ix).
Born on 1 February 1900, Milner qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1943. She was in her eighties, and still very involved in art and psychoanalysis, when feminist interest in her books led to their re-publication in the 1980s. Following Milner's death on 29 May 1998 her biographer, psychotherapist Emma Letley, helped bring about further re-publication of Milner's books in the 2010s. They, in turn, have inspired American professor of literature, David Russell, to devote a book to Milner's writings about creativity, and Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba to write about the implications of Milner's insights for their work as psychotherapists today.
Russell begins with a chapter about Milner's diary-keeping books, A Life of One's Own and An Experiment in Leisure . Like Auden, he applauds Milner's rejection of narrowly focused attention in favour of wide attention to whatever captured her interest. To this Russell adds approval of her ‘readiness’ to use as imagery ‘themes and forms’ free from the ‘mass-produced mythology of Hollywood, of the newspapers, or the propaganda of dictators’ in 1930s Europe.
Russell also praises Milner for stitching together ‘event and memory, reflection and composition, life and art’ into ‘a medium of transfiguration’. That said, he turns to Milner's third book, On Not Being Able to Paint , beginning with her discovery that, contrary to her intention to draw ‘a peaceful sce