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Naomi Mitchison 1897 – 1999

Contents:

Biography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Page 1 Contexts……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Pages 2 – 3 Further Reading / Contacts………………………………………………………………………………………………….Pages 4 – 7

Biography:

Naomi Mitchison (1897 – 1999) : née Haldane, born 1897 in Edinburgh and educated

in Oxford.A prolific author (with over 100 novels and 1000 pieces of short fiction and essays), Mitchison interrupted her university career at an early age when she married the barrister and Labour politician G Richard Mitchison in 1916, and since 1937 has lived in Carradale/Kintyre, keenly involved in local politics. Her interest in travel has led her to Botswana, where she was adopted as advisor and ‘mother’ of the Bakgatha tribe during the 1960s.

Mitchison’s books, include mythical themes (The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), science fiction (Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962)), novels for children, biographies, a number of short stories and a volume of poetry. Her 1947 novel The Bull Calves is set in Perthshire in the years after the Jacobite rebellion.The story around her fictional ances- tor Kirsty Haldane is fictional, but background and events are real enough, painting a lively picture of life in 18th century rural Scotland. She died in January 1999.

Naomi Mitchison 1897 – 1999

Contexts:

Naomi Mitchison – Storyteller

Naomi Mitchison was many things – novelist, dramatist, essayist, poet, but above all she was a teller of stories.

The storytelling tradition goes as far back as humankind itself: we have always told stories – they are a way of understanding ourselves and the important things around us. From fireside folk tales to movies, from ballads to pop songs, from the great myths of Homer andVirgil to the latest novels riding up the bestseller charts,our appetite for stories has remained undimmed throughout several thousand years of human history.

We tell and listen to stories for all kinds of reasons: to be entertained; to imagine other places, other worlds; to experience romance and adventure, pursuit and danger, life and death without having to leave the comfort of our homes or families; to prepare us in some way for the real world; and to learn about ourselves and our communities, our ‘tribes’.To do all this, and more, is the role of the storyteller.

The novel is the one of our most sophisticated ways of telling stories, a complex and difficult art that often reveals rare and beautiful truths.The best novelists are those who touch something deep within us which continues to resonate long after we put the book away, whose words compel us to attention by the force of their narrative and verbal power.The best novels tell us something we realise we already knew but had never brought to mind in such a lucid and enlightening way. Some novels even succeed in telling us how the world is going to be.

Modern storytellers differ from their ancient counterparts only very slightly.Through them we are able to understand our world, without them we would lose much of what it means to be human.

Naomi Mitchison was born into an aristocratic family in the last years of the 19th century and spent her childhood in the English countryside. Later, after her marriage, she returned to Scotland to explore her family and cultural heritage in a large number of novels

– over 80 were published in her lifetime.As well as being a writer she was a hardworking member of the several communities she belonged to.When she moved from Oxford to Carradale on the Mull of Kintyre she became concerned with Highland affairs and played a prominent role in local politics, serving as a member of Argyll County Council for over 20 years. Her concerns, though, were not restricted to the local. She travelled widely, most significantly in Africa. In the 1960s, when she lived in Botswana, she was adopted as adviser and Mmarona (mother) of the Bakgatha tribe.

Naomi Mitchison 1897 – 1999

like the Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), to science fiction in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Solution Three (1975). She explored Scotland’s histor y, as well as her own, in novels which often reflect the influence of Walter Scott. She had an assured sense of the mythological in her work which lent a timeless quality to the best of her fiction, particularly her writing for young people, for example, in Graeme and the Dragon (1954).

Mitchison’s work is so vast and varied that it is impossible to neatly summarise the themes and issues at the heart of her fiction. It would not be misrepresenting her work too much to say that she was concerned throughout her life with the fate of women in a man’s world in a way that few women writers at the time were prepared to. Many of her works, particularly her controversial early novel We Have Been Warned (1935), explored rape, abortion, enslavement and the loss of children.

But this wasn’t all. She wrote about politics and the effects that political decisions, and political ideologies have on individuals and their communities.Very often these political themes would deal with contemporary Scotland in its struggle to keep its head afloat in the modern world.At other times she would investigate the past – most memorably her own past and that of her family inThe Bull Calves (1947) – as a way of engaging history and politics with her own roots.

Mitchison’s best writing always revealed a global sense of perspective that her reading

and research in history gave her, that she gained from living through the 20th century and participating in its turbulent politics, that she took from folk tale and myth. She was a writer who told the eternal stories of humankind. Her truly unique and international voice was one which spoke as much for the ‘world tribe’ as for her own community.

Written By Colin Clark

Naomi Mitchison 1897 – 1999