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Marion Milner has always had her admirers; but it seems that now she is getting her due. A range of essays and books have recently converged on her life and work, as artist and psychoanalyst, diarist and educationalist. These publications include a special issue of Critical Quarterly devoted to her work in 2021, a collection of essays and sources on her psychoanalytic practice compiled in 2023, and in 2024 a ‘contemporary introduction’, by two analysts, of her clinical technique, and my own book on reading Milner's approach to creativity. There is also a forthcoming memoir on learning from Milner's ‘experiments in living’.1 Emilia Halton Hernandez's The Marion Milner Method is a central document of this Milner moment; written from the point of view of an academic scholar of psychoanalysis, it is the first full monograph to take her as subject.
The inspiration for this resurgence of interest in Milner must in part be credited to the pioneering work of Emma Letley, who published the first biography of Milner in 2014, and who series-edited an attractive 2011–12 reissue of Milner's books by Routledge, with covers derived from Milner's own art, and often excellent introductions by different analysts, scholars and writers. (Responding to the current efflorescence, Routledge is issuing these books again, although in less attractive editions.) But it is, one suspects, not only a delayed response to the 2010s that accounts for the interest in Milner now. Perhaps there is something about our own time that responds to what is distinctive – both exciting and perplexing – about reading Milner. Her work is as much searching spiritual exercise as psychoanalytic report, and usually in a style more discursive than analytically concise. And it is very difficult to sum up: interested as it is in an almost bafflingly wide range of subjects and in forging surprising relationships between them. Milner's breadth of reference – which compasses novels, drama, poetry, visual art, music, anthr