Marion Milner

This is a book about reading, drawing, and getting better--and what they have to do with one another. The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1996) thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner's life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. David Russell shows that there is no writer quite like Milner and the rewards of reading her are immense. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention--of how we pay attention in the life we have. She helped to develop a kind of psychoanalysis in Britain that focussed on the ways people relate to their own lives and the lives of others. Milner was literary and artistic; she took herself as her subject. Her writing performs ways of responding associatively to the words and images she encountered. In the process, she found she was a quite different person than she had first thought. In the 1930s Milner invented a form for writing about reading: an original kind of diary book, which is structured by the experience of going back to, and rereading, past diaries. In her interplay of past and present selves, she finds new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

David Russell gained his PhD in English from Princeton University in 2011. After holding postdoctoral fellowships at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard University, and the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, he was a lecturer at King's College London from 2013-2015, and from 2015-2023 was Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow of Corpus Christi College. Russell is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His previous book concerns the tact of the essay form. His current interests are in British psychoanalysis, art history, and the writings of John Ruskin. He has written widely on the essay and his work has been supported by the Leverhulme Foundation.