In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner
Book Details
- Publisher : Jonathan Cape
- Published : May 2025
- Cover : Hardback
- Pages : 256
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98217
- ISBN 13 : 9781787335059
- ISBN 10 : 1787335054
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Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life.
Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own.
In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach - from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea - she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire.
Reviews and Endorsements
In Defence of Leisure lilts beautifully between whispering diaries and the chant of a manifesto. Akshi Singh has crafted an exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived. Yet she never shies from questions of risk, of where to put our anger, or of what we concede in exchange for love. Untangling security - so often pernicious and compromising - from care, Singh insists on a wide horizon, full of freedom, for everyone.
Marianne Brooker, author of Intervals
I loved this carefully thought and deceptively light touch account of seeking and finding leisure, written through and alongside the work of Marion Milner. The prose radiates recreation, at once defiant and joyful – curious, expansive and open to unexpected turns. A delight.
Helen Jukes
In Defence of Leisure is an astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating contemplation of love, grief, and the enigma of discovering one’s own desires. Through vivid and exquisitely rendered vignettes of relationships, domestic life and family scenes, Akshi Singh situates us in the very spaces where desires are forged and our wishes are bottled up, diverted or allowed to take flight. I was deeply moved and awed by Singh’s ability to hold and distil the shifting ground of thought and feeling, and infected by her commitment to the unsolved difficulty of living and loving
Daisy LaFarge, author of Paul
In Defence of Leisure is elegant, invigorating and beautiful. I could barely read a single paragraph without wanting to take a photo of it to share with friends. In this book Akshi Singh writes on some of the biggest questions I trouble with – how to live with a ‘kind of hope that has risk at its heart’ and how to truly know my own desires. I feel renewed and accompanied by Singh’s tender self-explorations and insights as she considers those questions, grateful her book has given me the chance to see her mind at work and more hopeful that my continued experiments in both leisure and pleasure bring me closer to liberty
Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue
About the Author(s)
Akshi Singh is an associate editor at Parapraxis and deputy editor at Critical Quarterly, and is the editor of a special collection of Critical Quarterly presenting new writing on Marion Milner. She collaborates regularly with the Derek Jarman lab, and writes for the London Review of Books. Singh moved to the UK from India to study for a PhD in psychoanalysis and literature with Jacqueline Rose. She is currently training to be a psychoanalyst at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.
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