Marion Milner: 8 books

In this series, Emma Letley has worked with the Marion Milner estate to re-contextualise six classic volumes by arranging for experts to provide new scholarly introductions to each book. This six volume pack comprises: The Hands of the Living God On Not being Able to Paint Eternity's Sunrise A...

Following on from A Life of One’s Own and An Experiment in Leisure, Eternity’s Sunrise explores Marion Milner’s way of keeping a diary. Recording small private moments, she builds up a store of ‘bead memories.’ A carved duck, a sprig of asphodel, moments captured in her travels in Greece,...

How often do we ask ourselves, ‘What will make me happy? What do I really want from life?’ In A Life of One’s Own Marion Milner explores these questions and embarks on a seven year personal journey to discover what it is that makes her happy. On its first publication, W. H. Auden found...

Milner's final text, Bothered by Alligators, came about when, in her nineties, she unexpectedly came across a diary she had kept during the early years of her son's life, recording his conversations and play between the ages of two and nine. With it was a storybook written and illustrated by him when...

What is it that stops people from knowing what they want? How often do we wonder where we are going and what our world is all about? Written in 1936 as a companion piece to A Life of One’s Own, An Experiment in Leisure further charts Marion Milner’s illuminating and rewarding investigation...

Published in 1938, this book documents a psychological study carried out on behalf of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust. Comprising 25 schools, the trust set the standard for girls’ education for the first decade of the twentieth century and the pioneering study was set to serve the cause of...

At once autobiographical and psychoanalytic, The Hands of the Living God, first published in 1969, provides a detailed case study of Susan who, during a 20-year long treatment, spontaneously discovers the capacity to do doodle drawings. An important focus of the book is the drawings themselves,...

Milner’s great study, first published in 1950, discusses the nature of creativity and those forces which prevent its expression. In focusing on her own beginner’s efforts to draw and paint, she analyses not the mysterious and elusive ability of the genius but – as the title suggests – the...