Novel by Angela Milne republished

Every so often over the years, more in hope than expectation, I've trawled the internet in search of a copy of One Year's Time, a rare novel by Angela Milne, niece of A.A. Milne. I first came across it in the National Library of Scotland in the mid-eighties when researching the plays of her uncle; like him, she had worked for Punch and had a light and appealing prose style. 

I contacted her directly around then and complimented her on the book; I received a charming reply in which she shared some of her memories of her famous relative. Sadly, my filing system means it may take a few aeons to locate that reply - though I recall its spidery writing and think I'm representing her correctly in saying that he was keen on Dickens, particularly David Copperfield, but that his plays were "a little fluffy", at least when she looked back on them nowadays. 

This happened to be an opinion shared by my university tutor, who had expressed his reservations about my choosing Milne as a subject, and although I wasn't forced into it - gently nudged, perhaps, with a few playful references to the many similarities between Milne's various plays, with their frequently disappearing spouses - I eventually changed the topic of my dissertation. No, not to Frederick Lonsdale or J.M. Barrie but ... Tennessee Williams. 

Which was a bit of a leap, by anyone's standards. I'm still not sure whether or not that was for the better, especially as it meant that several months' work was now of no practical use. But Milne (A.A.) stayed with me, and some years later I tried to write a play around the fact that his house in Sussex was bought in the sixties by former Rolling Stone Brian Jones, an early exponent of the "getting-it-together-in-the-country" syndrome. Which might sound a wacky and wonderful idea in theory but I was never able to find a satisfactory structure to accommodate these two stories, though I persisted in this folly for a couple of years. When a theatre's literary manager said that the two main characters seemed linked only by "an accident of geography" he probably had a point.

And what of Angela Milne? The reason for this post is that today, idly searching her name yet again, I was delighted to see that her one and only novel has just been republished in a cheap edition by the British Library. I can't pretend to recall it vividly enough to venture a synopsis here, other than saying it centres around a relationship, but what I can say is that despite similarities in style - most notably in characters' jokey exchanges - the subject matter of her book is darker than is customary in her uncle's work.  Even though most of her other writing seems to have been on the lighter side: there is a collection of her pieces for Punch entitled "Jam and Genius" which often crops on secondhand book sites.

 I'm looking forward to revisiting the novel after so long. It's tempting to speculate about why this might have been her only novel. Presumably it wasn't a big seller at the time but could being a witness of her uncle's decline in popularity have been a factor? I don't have it to hand but in Ann Thwaite's excellent biography of A.A. Milne there is a rather sad detail: Milne signs a book for a relative or friend and imagines that it will be found on the untouched bookshelf of a guest house along with other boring titles which nobody reads anymore. 

Anyway, Angela Milne persisted in her writing. A blog devoted to New Statesman competitions includes the following details about her career: 

... born in 1909 .... Angela Milne was one of the most highly regarded Punch contributors (she turns up repeatedly in Pick of Punch from the forties onwards, and she also wrote as ‘Ande’. She was a regular contributor to London-based magazines until the 1980s), and she was also valued as a reviewer (she reviewed for The Observer). She was still publishing humorous books in her seventies.