Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison (née Haldane; 1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote more than 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
Childhood, family background and early career
Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane was born in Edinburgh, the daughter and younger child of the physiologist John Scott Haldane and his wife (Louisa) Kathleen Trotter. Naomi's parents came from different political backgrounds, her father being a Liberal and her mother from a Conservative, pro-imperialist family. However, both were of landed stock; the Haldane family had been feudal barons of Gleneagles since the 13th century. Today the best-known member of the family is probably Naomi's elder brother, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), but in her youth her paternal uncle Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, twice Lord Chancellor (from 1912 to 1915 under H. H. Asquith, and in 1924 during the first Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald), was better known.
Naomi followed her brother to the Oxford Preparatory School (later Dragon School) in 1904–1911, as the only girl there. From 1911, she was tutored at home by a governess. She qualified for the University of Oxford in 1914, via the Oxford higher local examination and entered the Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College) to pursue a degree course in science. However, she chose before completing the course to become a volunteer nursing assistant, as the First World War had broken out. After a course in first aid and home nursing in 1915, she joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Thomas's Hospital, London. Her service was much curtailed after she caught scarlet fever.
The Haldanes were known for their self-styled domestic experiments. She and her brother John started investigating Mendelian genetics in 1908. They initially used guinea pigs as experimental models, but changed to mice as they were more convenient to handle. Their findings were published as "Reduplication in Mice" in 1915. This was in fact the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals.
Mitchison was a prolific writer of more than 90 books in her lifetime, across a multitude of styles and genres. These include historical novels such as her first novel The Conquered (1923), set in Gaul in the 1st century BCE, during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and her second novel Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925) set in 5th-century BCE Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War. Her best work is thought to be The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which treats three different societies, including a wholly fictional one, and explores themes of sexuality that were daring in her day. Terri Windling called it "a lost classic". Commenting on her collection of stories The Delicate Fire, Rebecca West said "Mrs. Mitchison stands head and shoulders above the writers of her generation, not only in this country."
Literary critic Geoffrey Sadler stated of Mitchison's historical fiction: "On the basis of her early writings, she is unquestionably one of the great historical novelists."
In 1932, Mitchison was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to edit a guide to the modern world for children. Mitchison's book, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents, included several distinguished contributors, including W. H. Auden, Richard Hughes, Gerald Heard, and Olaf Stapledon. On publication, An Outline was praised by The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the London Mercury. However, several clergymen, including the Archbishop of York, were angered by the book's lack of emphasis on Christianity, while other right-wing authors objected to a perceived sympathy with the Soviet Union. The Conservative writer Arnold Lunn wrote a lengthy attack on the book in the English Review, which contributed to its commercial failure.
Undoubtedly her most controversial work, We Have Been Warned, was published in 1935, based on a journey to the Soviet Union. In it she explored sexual behaviour, including rape and abortion. The book was rejected by various publishers and ultimately censored. She approached first her friend Victor Gollancz, who flatly turned her down, observing that "publication of the book would cause a real outcry." The book was extensively rewritten to make it more acceptable to publishers, and was still subject to censorship. On publication it was universally despised for its depiction of rape, free love and abortion that "alienated readers on the left and horrified those on the political right." In 2005, files from the National Archives revealed that the British government had considered prosecuting the publishers of We Have Been Warned, but ultimately decided not to do so.
Mitchison was a compulsive writer, as her travelogues revealed. She wrote on planes or in trains as prompted by the situation. For example, she wrote up a visit to the US in the 1930s, objecting to sharecropping.
Her 1938 book The Moral Basis of Politics was a treatise on ethics and politics that she had worked on for three years. In it she defended the right of the left-wing journalist H. N. Brailsford to criticise the Moscow Trials, which had caused controversy on the British left at the time.
Mitchison's The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) is set against the background of Nero's persecution of the Christians. She draws parallels between Nero and dictators of her own time, Mussolini and Hitler.
In 1952, Mitchison went to Moscow as a member of the Authors' World Peace Appeal. She frequently visited Africa, especially Botswana, where she was made a sort of tribal mother (Mmarona) to the baKgatla people. Mucking Around (1981) best describes her haphazard travels in five continents over 50 years.
Her later works included further historical novels: The Bull Calves (1947) about the Jacobite rising of 1745 and The Young Alexander the Great (1960). She also turned to fantasy, such as Graeme and the Dragon (1954, Graeme Mitchison being a grandson through Denis), science fiction such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Solution Three (1975), fantasy such as the humorous Arthurian novel To the Chapel Perilous (1955), non-fiction such as African Heroes (1968), and also children's novels, poetry, travel and a three-volume autobiography. She was unsure exactly how many books she had written, often claiming there were about 70. The articles were uncountable, from book reviews for the old Time and Tide magazine and the New Statesman to practical essays on farming, campaigning articles, recollections and reflections.
After her husband's death, Mitchison wrote several memoirs, published as separate titles between 1973 and 1985. She was also a good friend of the writer J. R. R. Tolkien, and one of the proof readers of The Lord of the Rings. Maxim Lieber served as her literary editor in 1935.
Mitchison, like her brother, was a committed socialist in the 1930s. She visited the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a Fabian Society group and expressed some misgivings about the direction of Soviet society. An active anti-fascist, Mitchison travelled to Austria, where she undertook the risky task of smuggling documents and left-wing refugees out of the country. She stood unsuccessfully as a Labour Party candidate for the Scottish Universities in 1935, at a time when universities were still allowed to elect MPs. Eventually, as her political candidacy and her pro-Left writings had failed, she gradually became disenchanted with the Left. At that time, she became politically attracted to Scottish Nationalism and increasingly wrote on specifically Scottish issues and themes. She supported the Scottish National Party candidate, William Power in the parliamentary by-election for the Argyllshire constituency in 1940. Later she became active in the Scottish Convention launched by John MacCormick in 1943, serving on its education committee. Her name was on George Orwell's list of people, prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department (IRD) set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government, who were considered to have pro-communist leanings and so be inappropriate to write for the IRD.