In her twenties, Marion Milner began a seven-year private experiment: she would keep a diary of the moments that felt most vividly alive, hoping to discover what actually made her happy rather than what she had learned to believe should.

Writing under the name Joanna Field, she follows small pleasures, recurring fears, dreams, automatic writing and apparently trivial sensations into the less obedient regions of her own mind. Neither conventional memoir nor self-help manual, A Life of One’s Own treats attention as a form of psychological investigation. Its title quietly answers Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: having acquired external space, what would it mean for a woman to possess her interior life?

Milner discovers that happiness cannot be secured through discipline or introspection alone; it requires a loosening of control, a willingness to notice what the conscious self habitually excludes. Her account is unusually candid about the gulf between declared desires and the obscure wants that organise a life beneath them.

Virago Press edition, 1986, offset from the 1952 Pelican edition. Paperback. Good condition, with tanning, rubbing, creasing and general wear to the covers.