MILNER, Marion [writing as Joanna Field]

A Life of One's Own

(Chatto and Windus, London, 1934)

DESCRIBED BY AUDEN AS BEING "AS EXCITING AS A DETECTIVE STORY" – THE MODERN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

8vo; pp. xx; 252, with three plates tipped in.

A double-signed copy of the first edition of this work, in the scarce dust-jacket. Published under the pseudonym Judith Field. First coyly inscribed 'D.B.R. / with love from / the "authors"' (apparently plural) and dated November 1934; this inscription struck through and replaced with 'for John Yoeman [sic] / from / Marion Milner', and dated November 1969. The dedicatee is the advertising copy-writer and bibliophileJohn Richard Harding Yeoman (1916–1988).

Marion Milner (1900–1998) is increasingly recognized as one of the most important British psychoanalists of the 20th century. This is the book that propelled her to fame: an utterly compelling account of an experiment – undertaken over many years – in pure introspection. Milner set out, in 1926, to write a diary, with the following method:

"(a) to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and to try to record them in words.

(b) To go over these records in order to see whether I could discover any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred."

Eight years later, Milner produced A Life of One's Own, "signalling not so much a debt to as an upgrade on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own" (Clair Wills, LRB 20 February 2025). The book recounts the making of the diary, which is quoted from but becomes itself an object of analysis.

Though literary in form, Milner's experiment was a serious one:

In 1925 her brother, Patrick Blackett, had become the first person deliberately to transmute one element into another, by firing alpha particles into nitrogen atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge. (He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.) Milner’s research was arguably just as ambitious. She wanted to use scientific methods to analyse the inner workings of the self, to access the ‘direct sense of what was real in my internal universe’. (Wills in the LRB)

The book was well received – Auden and Spender reviewed it favourably, with Auden writing that it was "as exciting as a detective story", high praise in the 'Golden Age of Detective Fiction'. A Life of One's Own has been reprinted a number of times, and a new edition will be published by Routledge in May 2024.

Very good condition, in the very scarce dust-jacket, about good condition; jacket worn and scuffed, with extra wear to the top and bottom of the spine, which have been re-inforced in the past, though this is only visible on the inside of the jacket; the volume itself clean and bright throughout, noting only some fragility to the page edges and occasional weakening to the binding between gatherings.