{"product_id":"a-life-of-one-s-own-by-joanna-field-marion-milner","title":"'A Life of One’s Own' by Joanna Field (Marion Milner)","description":"\u003ch4\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWriting 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, \u003cem\u003eA Life of One’s Own\u003c\/em\u003e treats attention as a form of psychological investigation. \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eIts title quietly answers Virginia Woolf’s \u003cem\u003eA Room of One’s Own\u003c\/em\u003e: having acquired external space, what would it mean for a woman to possess her interior life?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMilner 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVirago Press edition, 1986, offset from the 1952 Pelican edition. Paperback. Good condition, with tanning, rubbing, creasing and general wear to the covers.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"bower books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45725106077779,"sku":null,"price":22.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0689\/0268\/2707\/files\/thebowerbooker-2026-06-22T144733.302.png?v=1782103667","url":"https:\/\/bowerbooks.com\/products\/a-life-of-one-s-own-by-joanna-field-marion-milner","provider":"bower books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}