Naomi Mitchison
Naomi Mitchison was a notable Scottish writer born on November 1, 1897, in Edinburgh. Coming from a socially prominent family, she was educated at Oxford and developed a keen interest in physics and botany. During World War I, she served as a volunteer nurse, and two years later, she married Gordon Richard Mitchison, with whom she had seven children in an open marriage that reflected her feminist beliefs. Mitchison's literary career began in her teens, and she published her first novel, *The Conquered*, in 1923, establishing a pattern of blending historical detail with elements of myth and fantasy in her works. She became an active member of the Labour Party and expressed her social and political views through both fiction and nonfiction, addressing themes such as birth control and social justice. Over her career, she embraced various genres, including historical fiction and science fiction, with notable works like *Memoirs of a Spacewoman* that explored utopian futures. Later, she focused on anticolonialist themes, celebrating African culture through her writings. Mitchison continued to write prolifically until her death on January 11, 1999.
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Naomi Mitchison
- Born: November 1, 1897
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died: January 11, 1999
Biography
Naomi Mitchison was born Naomi Margaret Haldane in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 1, 1897. Her family was socially prominent and well connected. Her mother, Louisa Kathleen Trotter Haldane, was a socialite from an established Tory family, and her father, John Scott Haldane, a professor of physiology at Oxford, was descended from an ancient Scottish family that included many statesmen and scholars. Her brother J. B. S. Haldane, older by five years, would become a world-famous geneticist.
Haldane grew up in an intellectually and politically progressive household. She was schooled at Oxford and later at home, concentrating on physics and botany. With the outbreak of World War I, she served briefly as a volunteer nurse in London in 1914. Two years later she married Gordon Richard Mitchison, then a soldier at the front; he would later become a successful barrister and Parliamentary representative for the Labour Party. The Mitchisons had an open marriage, fueled in part by Naomi’s feminist inclinations, but they also would have seven children.
The Mitchisons had moved to London in 1919, and partook of the rich intellectual scenes there, numbering among their friends and associates Andrew Lang, A. P. Herbert, E. M. Forster, and Wyndham Lewis (who would illustrate Mitchison’s Beyond This Limit [1935].) Mitchison had been writing since her teens, and published her first novel, The Conquered, in 1923. Set in Rome in the first century b.c.e., it blended factual historical detail with colorful myth and legend.
Her first work set the pattern for much fiction she wrote thereafter, including When the Bough Breaks, and Other Stories (1924), Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925), Black Sparta: Greek Stories (1928), and her most celebrated early novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), in which second and third century Greece serves as a backdrop for study of the origins of gender roles and social customs. Much of her work was leavened with fantasy, as she depicted characters endowed with the mystical powers or wrote allegorical tales cast with characters of myth and folklore. Some of her fantastic writing was marketed as work for children, although she also wrote plays and fiction intentionally for young readers, including The Hostages, and Other Stories for Boys and Girls (1930) and Boys, and Girls, and Gods (1931).
Mitchison joined the Labour Party in 1931 and promulgated her views on socialism in travels to the European Continent and the Soviet Union. She wrote several nonfiction tracts on social and political issues, including Comments on Birth Control (1930) and The Moral Basics of Politics (1938). She also wrote novels that were thinly veiled allegories on these themes, such as We Have Been Warned (1935), a novel concerned with birth control and free love, and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), which drew parallels between the persecution of Christians in Rome and Nazism.
The Mitchisons spent most of World War II in Scotland, where Mitchison was inspired to write several historical novels on Scottish themes, notably The Bull Calves (1947). In the 1960’s, a new phase in her writing began when she openly embraced science fiction for its allegoric potential. Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) was a utopian novel projecting a future pangalactic civilization in which differences between genders and species have been overcome. Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983) both extrapolate futures in which a scientific elite engineers social doctrines. In 1963, she her became involved in the anticolonialist struggles of Botswana and Zambia and wrote several celebrations of African culture and critique of imperialism, including African Heroes (1968), The Africans (1970), and Images of Africa (1980). Mitchison’s long and prolific writing career continued until shortly before her death on January 11, 1999.