The lovely people at British Library Publishing have sent me another excellent reprint in their British Library Women Writers series. Here we have a book originally published in 1942, the only novel of A.A. Milne’s niece, Angela.

Angela Milne – “One Year’s Time”

(10 July 2023, from the publisher)

Liza thought, we can’t go on if we’re not married. We’re marking time. When we were in London and he went out in the evenings, I was jealous if it was a woman, and if it was a man I was resentful, and I thought, he doesn’t want me to meet his friends. And when I did, either I was his girl friend or some one he had known a long time and would never be in love with, according to the occasion. And all the time I was waiting to be me. (p. 135)

In this interesting and incredibly frank for its time novel, published in 1942 but set in the 1930s, we meet Liza, who has a dull office job (it’s not weird that I liked the office scenes best, is it? I DO like an office-based novel) and Walter, who comes round one evening and becomes her lover almost immediately.

There’s no whiff of marriage, and of course it’s Liza who suffers, however modern she thinks she is: it’s Liza who is thrown into embarrassment when she makes up stories, especially when they’re staying away from home, for a weekend or the summer, and either she doesn’t get her own story straight or she worries, twisting, we imagine, her cheap Woolworth’s ring she bought herself, that Walter will blow her cover. As indeed he does to their neighbour in the countryside where they take a house – although if it was down to Walter, he’d go abroad to write his book, and he has no hesitation in doing so when he gets bored. Poor Liza is stuck: Walter wants his home comforts but taunts her with the horrific possibility of becoming a “little woman”, so she must be all things to him, just as he wishes.

The language of the book is almost 1920s and flapperish, though the two main characters are socially below that generation, but, “Voice from the back of the hall, what!” is the sort of style Walter uses. We constantly zip in and out of Liza’s head which can be tiring, but not as tiring as being Liza and having to watch her step at every turn, whether with Walter or in front of others. Liza is constantly thinking of time passing, and indeed an exact year passes in the book; and she’s also constantly comparing herself with other married and unmarried women. Money also seems to be a worry, although Simon Thomas carefully explains in the Afterword that she’s certainly not destitute.

Events cycle round: but while she regains some things out of home, work and love, she loses others, even having a hopeful prospect of one of these whipped away. This book would have been so shocking in its time, with its bed scenes, if not sex scenes, but it serves even now to show that people will be people (and, sorry, men will be men and get away with it), and that unmarried couples existed way before the licentiousness permitted by the Second World War.

As usual in these attractive and interesting books, there’s a 1940s timeline, a biographical note and a Preface that seems to see the power structure in the novel as I do, and the Afterword brings out the joint preoccupations of the novel with sex and money, transactional in nature the both of them.

Thank you so much to the British Library for sending me this book and others in the series in return for an honest review. “One Year’s Time” is available now. You can buy all the British Library Women Writers books (and more) at the British Library Shop (https://shop.bl.uk/ and this one here).