Beyond Winnie-the-Pooh: On A.A. Milne’s Romance Novels

In A. A. Milne’s 1946 novel, Chloe Marr, an elderly vicar says to the twenty-eight-year-old heroine, “You had a happy childhood?” and Chloe replies, with feeling: “Until I was thirteen. Then I grew up rather quickly.” A. A. Milne’s favorite play was J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

There are no grown-ups in the Hundred Acre Wood. Eeyore can be gloomy in an adult sort of way. Christopher Robin is “sensible” at times, as a parent might be. Without resolving them, Rabbit and Owl occasionally ponder complicated issues, much as a middle-aged couple might—much in the manner of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot:

“Well?”

“Exactly,” said Owl. “Precisely.” And he added, after a little thought, “If you had not come to me, I should have come to you.”

“Why?” asked Rabbit.

“For that very reason,” said Owl, hoping that some thing helpful would happen soon.

There is an adult world beyond the world of Pooh—we know that. There will be Big Questions that need to be answered one day—but not yet.

For the next fifty years, females of all ages both delighted and troubled him. He was not sure he ever understood them, but…he wrote about women time and time again.

Essie, the vicar’s wife in Chloe Marr, cannot believe that the beautiful and glamorous Chloe was ever happy. She sees the young woman’s apparently carefree and frivolous way of life as “an attempt to hide from herself how unhappy she was.” “She was happy as a child,” insists the vicar. “‘Until I was thirteen,’ he quoted, ‘and then I grew up rather quickly.’ What did she mean by that, Essie?”

Essie has the answer: “It’s the dangerous age, when you accept your nature or are at odds with it, perhaps for the rest of your life.”

Until we are twelve (thirteen at the most), we can be children. According to Christopher Robin (the real Christopher Robin), the Milnes had a key that could take them back to childhood. It is the key that Alan used when he opened the gates to the Hundred Acre Wood and wrote Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Childhood is the place, the only place, where you find pure happiness. It is Paradise, before the Fall.

In the summer of 1898, when Ken left Westminster School for a solicitor’s office in Weymouth, Alan, without his brothers or his mother, went on holiday with his father. The pair of them went on a pleasure-cruise to Norway. “I was sixteen…just beginning to grow up,” said Alan—adding, “I was, in fact, unbearable.”

This was the summer when A. A. Milne discovered girls. From then on, for the next fifty years, females of all ages both delighted and troubled him. He was not sure he ever understood them, but outside of his four children’s books (in which they barely feature), he wrote about women time and time again. They fascinated him and perplexed him. Let’s face it (I know this is a book in which our hero is Winnie-the-Pooh, but let’s face it all the same), they excited him. In the late 1920s, when D. H. Lawrence’s sex-suffused novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published in Italy and France, in England, in his novel Two People, A. A. Milne was writing about sex, too—less graphically than Lawrence, for sure, but with, at moments, as we shall see, a comparable erotic charge.

Back in the summer of 1898, on his teenage Norwegian cruise, Alan noticed “a very attractive young woman on board who had all the men round her.” Alan was on the outskirts of the crowd, hoping for, and sometimes getting, a smile. He was aware of his own schoolboy charm. “In my pink-and-white tie (second XI) and green and blue cap (College colours),” he boasted, “I could probably have got a smile from anybody.” Years later, in his mind’s eye, he could still picture her “swinging her legs on the deck rail” and catching his eye with “that warm, sudden smile which meant that we two had some secret which the others did not share…” He wondered to himself, “Was I in love for the first time?”

Briefly, he dreamed the impossible dream, but, quite quickly, he woke up and, “without any embarrassment, I transferred my affection to the charms of deck-cricket and a girl called Ellen.” Ellen was exactly his own age. He never forgot her, but in later life he chose not to reveal her surname “in case she is no longer my own age.”

When he was in his forties and his fame and fortune were at their zenith, he began writing Two People, for adults, and it was all about love.

He did not forget the older girl, either—the one who had all the men round her when she was swinging her legs on the deck rail. After the publication of his four children’s books, when he was in his forties and his fame and fortune were at their zenith, he began writing Two People, for adults, and it was all about love—young love, married love, extra-curricular love…The central character is an author who dotes on his wife completely and then, by chance, in his early forties, at a supper party, is introduced to a beautiful actress, Coral Bell. She is forty-seven: “She doesn’t look forty-seven.” She was twenty-two when he had first seen her—and last seen her—at a distance, on stage. He had been instantly enchanted by her performance, by her look, by her laughter: “bubbling happiness coming out of this absurdly attractive face—large eyes, large mouth and very little else.” It all came flooding back to him:

Coral Bell! Twenty-five years ago none had been so Coral-mad as he. She was in all his day-dreams. When he was batting, she was watching; when he was in his form-room, she was waiting in the Yard outside, and as he crossed it, would ask him the way to the Headmaster’s house. It would appear that she didn’t want to see the Headmaster very much, for when he suggested an afternoon on the river, and tea at the Rose and Crown, she agreed at once. It meant cutting cricket, and perhaps trouble afterwards, but how gladly one would suffer for her sake.

He was sixteen. Legally you could be married at fourteen, but they might have to wait until he was twenty-one. Five years, and everybody else in the house wanting to marry her too. But if they were wrecked on a desert island together…If only.

And then, a few weeks later, in London, he meets her again—again by chance, at the corner of Piccadilly and Sackville Street. “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaims. “Yes, it’s me,” she replies—and she remembers him.

“You were the darling who fell in love with me when you were sixteen. That was—are you any good at arithmetic?”

“Pretty fair as it happens. I was in a bank once.”

“A bank! Oh dear! Then if you happened to know how old I was when you fell in love with me, you’d easily be able to work out how old I am now?”

“No…Mine was one of those banks where time grew very wild. You couldn’t depend on it at all. One might have been eighteen twenty-five years ago, and just about thirty now.”

“And if one had been twenty-two then?”

“Then one could easily be looking twenty-nine in Sackville Street.”

And what happens next you will discover when you read the novel—and you must. Two People is one of the best books A. A. Milne ever wrote. P. G. Wodehouse, his contemporary and sometime friend, considered it “colossal,” the work of “a genius.” Years later, after the Second World War, when Milne and Wodehouse had fallen out, Wodehouse still rated it: “I can re-read a thing like Two People over and over again and never get tired of it.”

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From Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of “Winnie-the-Pooh” by Gyles Brandreth. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.