The Naomi Mitchison Library
18 primary works • 27 total works
Book 1
Book 4
Naomi Mitchison published her first novel, The Conquered, in 1923. In her more than seventy succeeding books she has produced an extraordinary out-put, especially in the novel and the short story. This selection of the shorter fiction is intended to illustrate her range and achievement over more than fifty years. Beyond This Limit was the result of a unique co-operative partnership with illustrator Wyndham Lewis, and story and pictures are here first reproduced from the limited edition of 1935. The other contents range from a story of the cave painters of Lascaux, through Mitchison's major fictional preoccupations, ancient Greece, Scotland, Africa, to a story of post-holocaust Scotland first published in 1982. Central to all of them is a very individual intelligence constantly examining the politics of power in human relationships, including sexual ones. Edited with an Introduction by Isobel Murray, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
Book 6
Small Talk... avoids the temptation of a full-blown 'My Life and Times' type of autobiography and presents instead a recreation of childhood years in Oxford before the First World War - a child's-eye view of the family, the friends, the servants, the pets and the holidays in Scotland and Cornwall that made up that childhood. It is as much concerned with her own development as an amateur field botanist as with the occasions when the adult world intruded, when 'Uncle Richard' (Lord Haldane) might lead the younger members of the family out to the wash-house to watch the messy business of heating wax to take the impression of the Great Seal of England. If Lord Baden-Powell and Andrew Lang appear briefly, it is less as famous figures of the period, but rather as irritating visitors with passions either for tying knots or talking about fairies who interrupted the pleasures of raiding the kitchen garden for fruit, or reading at night behind the curtains of the drawing-room. There are glimpses of her reactions to scientific theories, as they reached her in repercussions from her father's work, and to the High Tory politics of her formidable mother. Small Talk... is a precise, vivid picture of the people and manners of a world which has receded so rapidly that it is now further from the experience of people today as the other side of the moon. In another sense, though, it is a timeless picture of childhood itself. The introductory essay by Ali Smith "The Woman From The Big House" was first first published in Chapman 50.
Book 7
In this day-by-day diary Mitchison tells us what she saw, did and felt: and the whole forms at once what is called a "human document" of rare poignancy and dramatic interest, and a book of some historical importance. In her words: "Very few people have both money and leisure, and the will, to do this. I've got this because of my profession. I rang up V[ictor] G[ollancz] on Monday evening, and asked if he'd give me an advance on a, very hypothetical, book about it. He said he would, and I'm going on that. I couldn't have otherwise. Simply as an observer I shall be some use; it's the one thing I'm sure I can do well, though I don't think I'm a good analyser. What I should like to do is to write a full diary every day, as truthful as it can possibly be. I shall type it on both sides of the sheet, so that it will fold small, and shall try and leave a duplicate with somebody; if I get my copy through, they can destroy theirs. But perhaps the whole thing is moonshine; perhaps there won't be anything to write down! If so, looking back on this afternoon from whenever it is in the future, I shall see myself looking a perfect fool. However, that won't be the first time ! Anyway, for what it's worth. I feel all thrilled now, screwed up like a child going to play Indians. Perhaps I shall be more grown-up by the end of it."
Book 11
Naomi Mitchison began her novel-writing career in the 1920s, with historical fictions set in the Ancient world, in Roman and Greek civilisations, and soon won a high reputation world-wide. But she began to move toward present and future as well as past: thus Lobsters on the Agenda (1952) dealt with contemporary Highland life. When in her sixties she began a lasting friendship with a young chief designate of the Bakgatla tribe, Linchwe, she went on to join the tribe, and was adopted as its Mother. She wrote only one adult novel about Botswana, When We Become Men (1965). This fine novel deals with the contemporary fight for equality across southern Africa, and the struggle against apartheid. It ends up projecting towards a future where fighting would be unnecessary. Her main character here is Isaac, a young man brought up in Pretoria, who believes in resistance to a white minority government, and, like Nelson Mandela, backs bloodless sabotage as a political weapon. He deeply distrusts the remnants of the tribal system, and the power of the chiefs.
He meets Letlotse, young heir apparent to the Bakgatla, returning home from an expensive but sometimes bizarre or just irrelevant education in Britain. He distrusts old ways too, and is tempted towards national politics, away from the tribe. There are clashes of beliefs, and conflicting ideas and loyalties. There is violence here. There are rapes and murders, and some killings that the Africans regard rather as executions. Here is a vivid, clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth-pangs of a new, post-Imperial, Africa. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen
He meets Letlotse, young heir apparent to the Bakgatla, returning home from an expensive but sometimes bizarre or just irrelevant education in Britain. He distrusts old ways too, and is tempted towards national politics, away from the tribe. There are clashes of beliefs, and conflicting ideas and loyalties. There is violence here. There are rapes and murders, and some killings that the Africans regard rather as executions. Here is a vivid, clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth-pangs of a new, post-Imperial, Africa. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen
Book 12
Over a summer weekend at Gleneagles, the Haldane family gather. It's 1747 and a cautious Scotland is recovering from the '45 rebellion. To the party the family bring their own suspicions and troubles, and the weekend takes a dramatic turn when one of them conceals a rebel Jacobite in the attic.
Book 13
This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here! It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced. It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen
Book 17
In this unusual and accomplished novel Naomi Mitchison retells in realistic terms and colloquial dialogue the story of the passion and death of Jesus, hour by hour, as it unfolds over the twenty-four hours of Good Friday. In a restless Jerusalem under Roman occupation, political and personal agendas lead inexorably to the crucifixion, while the followers of Jesus - his mother, the fishermen, young Mary of Magdala - can only wait, unhappy and confused. Mitchison, probably inspired by the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-56, drew, in writing this novel, not only on the New Testament gospels but also on fragmentary or lost gospels and on tradition. Herself a humanist, she scrupulously presents 'the historical Jesus'. But at the end of the novel, as the disciples keep watch by the garden tomb, she leaves the reader with a question: what happened next? Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian who lives in Glasgow.
She is the author of Mitchison's Ghosts (Humming Earth, 2008), on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is working on a collected edition of Mitchison's essays and journalism to be published by Kennedy & Boyd.
She is the author of Mitchison's Ghosts (Humming Earth, 2008), on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is working on a collected edition of Mitchison's essays and journalism to be published by Kennedy & Boyd.
Book 18
Anna Comnena is described as the first female historian, the author of her father's celebratory biography. She was an educated princess in eleventh-century Constantinople, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius. She was expected to succeed him, and raised as heir, but her hopes were dashed by the birth of a younger brother. In what is over-modestly described as a biography, Naomi Mitchison combines her story with that of her father, and the whole civilisation of the Eastern Empire, indeed the whole known world of the time. The Eastern Empire is seen as a necessary bulwark between a young and promising Europe and the perils of Islam and wild tribes in Asia. Mitchison also warns her readership of the perils of a dead civilisation, and writing in 1928 she poses a challenge to the direction of Europe in these perilous postwar years. Thwarted ambition at last drove Anna to attempt to kill her brother, who, says Mitchison, went on to be one of the best of Emperors. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
Book 19
The Conquered was young Naomi Mitchison's first novel, published in 1923, just five years after the end of the First World War, in 1918. Mitchison chose to write about wars, but about historic ones, Julius Caesar's bloody and gradual conquest of Gaul. Instead of Caesar's serene lists of victories and setbacks, we have the impact of these wars on her Gallic hero Meromic. Profound and traumatic. From being heir to a proud tribe, the Veneti, he becomes by turns a slave, a revenge killer, a wanted man - and a slave again, with a severed right hand, a man looking to end it all. But his life was remediably complicated by his loyalty to and affection for Titus Barrus, the Roman who bought him, and treated him as man, not brute. His conflicts of loyalties are powerfully central. Mitchison was conscious that after the Great War there was still fighting in Ireland. Just as her natural and immediate sympathies were for the Gauls under Vercingetorix fighting the Roman giant, we are shown her own contemporary sympathies were with the Irish against the might of the British Empire. With an Introduction by Isobel Murray.
Book 20
Eschewing Plutarch and Shakespeare's tale of Mark Antony's fatal romance, Naomi Mitchison's 'Cleopatra's People' starts with the next generation, with the children of the Queen and of Charmian, one of her 'mates'. The impact of Cleopatra's life and personality is reflected through them, and their efforts to follow in her wake.
Book 21
Ancient Greek history and politics fascinated Naomi Mitchison, and in particular the long antagonism or rivalry of Athens and Sparta. In this, her second novel, she investigates the two city states through Alxenor, a young man from the tiny island of Poieessa, which changes hands as the balance of power changes. He does not choose his loyalty in a theoretical way, but as he experiences rough treatment from both. By Alxenor's day, Athens had declined from the golden age of Perikles, and the city was prone to bully smaller entities, but he is forced to recognise the much worse reality of Spartan civilisation, with iron discipline, cruelty and loss of individuality. Eventually, Mitchison came to see even the twentieth century in terms of struggles between Athens and Sparta, democracy and totalitarianism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
Book 22
Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career. Isobel Murray's Introduction here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives. Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
Book 23
In her post nuclear Holocaust world, overpopulation and feeding the people are the major problems. The third attempted Solution involves conditioned homosexual love for all, and the only babies born are clones of the best two individuals, Her and Him, born to favoured Clone Mums. Some'Professorial' scientists have refused to abandon marriage and heterosexual reproduction, and are an embarrassment. They have developed powerful new strains of cereals to feed the world, but ominous signs of failure and new diseases occur. Has this new world done enough to preserve gene pools in both humans and foodstuffs? Mitchison was one of the first to raise the potential problems of GM crops: her novel remains urgent, thoughtful and relevant in today's world.
Book 24
The Delicate Fire illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison's work. The early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts of the worlds of Sappho and 'Lovely Mantinea'. By the end, she seems wholly turned to the twentieth century - a new departure for her - tackling subjects such as the General Strike of 1926 and contemporaneous Hunger marches, and battles against censorship. This shift marks her politicisation, her growing fear of fascism, but more personally also the end of her long affair with a distinguished scholar of the ancient world. She turns away from Greece for good. She turns to the present, and will spend the thirties warning against fascism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen
Book 30
The Big House is a children's book with much to say to adult readers. On one level it is a charming and absorbing fantasy novel with a fairy hill, a Brounie and an enchanted piper all drawn from Celtic myth and legend, set in a West Highland village which is clearly Carradale in Kintyre, Naomi Mitchison's home for many years. On another level it is an examination of the social relationships in such a village at the time (it was first published in 1950), and this too is rooted in Mitchison's Carradale life. Su from the Big House and Winkie the fisherman's son have the same ancestry and their time-travel adventures show that their respective positions have changed back and forth over the years. Why should there be any difference between them now? Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian who lives in Glasgow, but was brought up in Kintyre, the setting of The Big House. She is the author of Mitchison's Ghosts (Humming Earth, 2008), on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is working on a collected edition of Mitchison's essays and journalism to be published in several volumes by Kennedy & Boyd.
Book 32
The writing career of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) stretched over some seventy years, encompassing at least seventy works of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry and plays. Almost unknown, however, is the mass of shorter prose pieces - journalism, essays, polemics, reminiscences - which Mitchison produced during her long career. There are many hundreds of these pieces, covering a tremendously wide range of topics, an untapped resource both in Mitchison biography and in the wider field of social history. Volume 2 in the seven-volume edition of Naomi Mitchison's Essays and Journalism is devoted to her writing about the West Highland village of Carradale, to which she moved in the late 1930s and where she lived for over sixty years. She writes about many aspects of Carradale: her farm, the local fishing industry, the big garden which was particularly dear to her heart, and 'the village and the Big House'. A long essay, 'Rural Reconstruction', never reprinted before, is a snapshot of Carradale in the 1940s and a spirited presentation of Mitchison's dreams for its future. These digressive, charming, combative pieces show both the practical and the thoughtful sides of her writing, often to touching effect: she cared deeply for Carradale and its people, and the book is a wonderful introduction to a beautiful part of Scotland and a major writer.
Book 41
In her novels, Naomi Mitchison frequently tackled serious issues, war and peace, conflicts of loyalties, freedom and slavery, and of course feminism. But a very few times she allowed her work to be primarily a question of fun, or play. In Travel Light (1952) she wrote a charming fairy tale in which a king's daughter was saved from death as a baby, then successively lived with bears and dragons. It is set in a Never Land which is nonetheless gently Norse, where Odin, the All-Father, 'made men in order to amuse himself'. In the course of her journey, Halla becomes perhaps the most individual Valkyrie in literature. This edition also contains The Varangs' Saga, a previously unpublished holiday entertainment from 1926, where most of the fun comes from describing young British couples with children on a group holiday in France, but describing them in the manner of an Old Norse saga. Mitchison wrote: 'Play is absolutely necessary to everyone: we are the kind of animal that plays.'
This collection, which Naomi Mitchison published in 1957, is recognisably a 'Carradale book', containing as it does vivid and realistic stories and poems of the landscape and the people. Mitchison had moved to the village in Kintyre, on the west coast of Scotland, some twenty years before and was still much involved in its affairs, supporting the fishing fleet and running her own small farm. Yet, as Moira Burgess suggests in her Introduction to this new edition, these thirteen stories and fourteen interspersed short poems and songs do not make a straightforward, celebratory, collection. The first five stories have historical settings in Caithness and Orkney, with the rest set in the contemporary West Highlands - some drawing on Highland myth and legend. And then, as Burgess writes, 'tucked modestly and apparently at random' is 'Five Men and a Swan' - 'a fine story, probably her best, a classic of Scottish literature'. Mitchison's years of intense involvement with the community were in fact drawing to an end. From the early 1960s onwards, she applied her energy and enthusiasm to the cause of the Bakgatla tribe in the newly independent country of Botswana. Her writing would turn to African themes, and, in 'a marvellous late flourish', to science fiction. Seen in this light, the book may be not so much a celebration as a coda to Mitchison's Carradale years.