David Russell, Marion Milner: On Creativity ( ‘My Reading’, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2024;  192 pp.)

Since the publication of new editions of her books from 2010 onward, along with Emma Letley's insightful biography in 2014, the work of British psychoanalyst, author and artist Marion Milner has inspired a proliferation of new book-length studies. These include Margaret Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff's edited collection The Marion Milner Tradition: Lines of Development: Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades (2022) and Alberto Stefano and Alessio Gambas's Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction (2024). Broadly speaking, these books focus on understanding and drawing out Milner's distinct theoretical and clinical contributions to psychoanalysis. My own book, The Marion Milner Method: Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Creativity (2023), attends to how Milner used autobiography, drawing and creative self-expression as therapeutic practice; what I term her ‘autobiographical cure’ (Halton-Hernandez, 2023). Most recently, Akshi Singh's memoir In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (2025) adopts some of Milner's creative self-help methods, embarking on her own Milnerian journey of self-exploration during a difficult crossroads in her life, with ‘life-changing consequences’ (Singh, 2025, p. 1).

Perhaps a testament to the generativity of Milner's work and the wide range of responses it has inspired, David Russell's book Marion Milner: On Creativity (2024) takes a slightly different approach. The book belongs to the Oxford University Press series My Reading, a collection which calls for ‘personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors… and to show their effect upon a reader's own thinking and development’ (Russell, 2024, p. vi). As a result, Russell's book provides us with his readerly response to Milner's writings, seeking to take a ‘more literary approach, which turns to Milner for the kind of insight she sought to evoke in her own reading and drawing’ (Russell, p. vii). Privileging his