One Year’s Time: British Library Women Writers 1940s

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.

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.