One Year's Time

Overview

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.

It’s New Year’s Day and Liza is painting her floor. Walter, who she met at the party the night before, arrives unexpectedly, and they immediately start a sexual relationship, dividing their nights between his flat and hers. The relationship continues through the course of the year, with the couple even posing as a married couple at one point.

But Liza is frustrated by Walter’s lack of commitment, finding herself continually compromising her dreams and her work to fit in with Walter’s ambitions, and increasingly questioning why she bends her personality in an effort to convince him she’d make the perfect wife. As the year draws to a close, she decides to take control.

Part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, the British Library Women Writers series highlights the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform.

Reviews

"Milne gives us many different portraits of female life and choices available to women in the immediate pre-war-world. She does quick sketches brilliantly – another secretary, Miss Derry, having to choose between her mother and moving to Burma with her fiancée, for example – and her descriptions of daily routine are made up of small observations about boredom which help us see exactly why Liza falls for the debonair Walter. Structured into four seasonal sections, the year stretches out. It’s a fascinating capture of a period in time (which is one of the many things I love about the choices made by the publishers of this series)." —Books and Wine Gums

"From a social history point of view this book was a real eye-opener for me as we’ve always been told that the introduction of the Pill in the late 1960s had led to the permissive society, but it seems that there was always a lot more ‘illicit’ sex going on than I would have thought." —Pining for the West

Author Biography

Angela Milne (1909–1990) was the niece of A. A. Milne. She was a regular and highly regarded contributor to Punch and is remembered for the best-selling Jam and Genius, one of two collections of her Punch pieces. One Year’s Time is her only novel, published in 1942.