Naomi Mitchison


Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books, covering historical fiction, 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. She was appointed CBE in 1981. The Corn King and the Spring Queen is seen by some as the best 20th-century historical novel.

Interests

Like her father John Scott Haldane and elder brother J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Haldane initially pursued a scientific career. From 1908, she and her brother looked into Mendelian genetics. Their 1915 publication was the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. However, whilst she was a diploma student at the Society of Oxford Home Students, the outbreak of the First World War changed her interest to nursing.
Naomi Mitchison was a vocal feminist, particularly campaigning for birth control. We Have Been Warned is noted as her most controversial work, with its explicit sexuality. It was rejected by leading publishers and ultimately censored.

Biography

Childhood and family background

Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane was born in Edinburgh, the daughter and younger child of the physiologist John Scott Haldane and his wife Kathleen Trotter. Naomi's parents came from different political backgrounds, her father being a Liberal and her mother from a Conservative and pro-imperialist family. However, both families were of landed stock; the Haldane family had been feudal barons of Gleneagles since the 13th century, but were nevertheless known for their achievements in other spheres. Today the best-known member of the family is probably Naomi's elder brother, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, but in her youth her paternal uncle Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, twice Lord Chancellor, was better known.
Naomi followed her brother to the Oxford Preparatory 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 to pursue a degree course in science. Before she completed the course she chose to become a nurse, for the First World War had broken out. After completing a course of 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.

Marriage and family life

On 11 February 1916, Naomi married the barrister Gilbert Richard Mitchison, who was a close friend of her brother. Mitchison was then on leave from the Western Front; like her, he came from a well-connected and wealthy family. He became a Queen's Counsel, then a Labour politician, and eventually a life peer on 5 October 1964 as Baron Mitchison of Carradale in the County of Argyll, on retirement for his political work. Naomi thus became Lady Mitchison as the wife of a life peer, but she objected to the title. She played an active part in her husband's political career and in his constituency duties.
Dick and Naomi Mitchison's marriage was not wholly satisfactory. After some years they both agreed to an open marriage, in which they entered into several other relationships that were conducted with dignity and described with humour. Her first serious lover was the Oxford classicist Theodore Wade-Gery, whose scholarship she drew on in writing her historical novels. As described in her autobiography, You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940, she fell deeply in love with Wade-Gery. She wrote him love poems and missed him greatly after he broke off the relationship, considering it incompatible with his marriage to another woman in 1928. She mitigated her sorrow by undertaking a risky mission to help persecuted socialists in fascist-dominated Austria. Later she had several briefer, less intense affairs, in which the men were in love with her and she did her best to reciprocate. As she emphasized in describing these, she was careful to use contraceptives with her lovers and let her children be fathered by her husband alone – although she dreamed of a future in which her daughters would be able to "have children by several chosen fathers, uncensured".
Naomi and Dick had seven children. Their four sons were Geoffrey, who died of meningitis, Denis, a professor of bacteriology, Murdoch, and Avrion, both professors of zoology. Their three daughters were Lois, Valentine, and Clemency, who died in 1940, shortly after her birth.
Between 1923 and 1939, they lived at River Court House, Mall Road, Hammersmith, London. They bought the Carradale House at Carradale in Kintyre in 1939, where they lived for the rest of their lives. The house was frequented by people of all sorts: lords, ladies, politicians, writers, neighbours, fishermen and farmers. She and Denis MacIntosh, a local fisherman, wrote a documentary, Men and Herring: A Documentary, in 1949. Ten years later this was adapted for BBC Television as a docudrama, Spindrift.

Literary career

Mitchison was a prolific writer, completing 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, set in Gaul in the 1st century BC, during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and her second novel Cloud Cuckoo Land set in 5th-century BC Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War. Her best work is considered to be The Corn King and the Spring Queen, which treats three different societies, including a wholly fictional one, and explores themes of sexuality that were daring for that day. Terri Windling described it as "a lost classic". Literary critic Geoffrey Sadler has 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, 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 what they claimed was a sympathetic attitude to 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. She approached first her friend Victor Gollancz, who flatly turned her down as he observed 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. Upon 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 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 would reveal. She would write 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.
Mitchison's 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 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 went frequently to Africa, especially to Botswana, where she was made a sort of tribal mother to the baKgatla people. Mucking Around best describes her haphazard travels in five continents over 50 years.
Later works included further historical novels: The Bull Calves about the Jacobite rising of 1745 and The Young Alexander the Great. She also turned to fantasy, such as Graeme and the Dragon, science fiction such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three, fantasy such as the humorous Arthurian novel To the Chapel Perilous, non-fiction such as African Heroes, and also children's novels, poetry, travel and a three-volume autobiography. She was never sure 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 she was one of the proof readers of The Lord of the Rings. Maxim Lieber served as her literary editor in 1935.

Activism

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 allowed to elect MPs. Eventually, as her political candidacy and her pro-Left writings had failed, she gradually became disenchanted with the Left. At this time she became politically attracted to Scottish Nationalism and increasingly wrote on specifically Scottish issues and themes. Her name was on George Orwell's list of people prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department 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.
Mitchison's advocacy continued in other ways. She acted as a spokeswoman for the island communities of Scotland. She was a friend of Seretse Khama and became an advisor to the Bakgatla tribe of Botswana. She also took a keen interest in the problems of Scotland and served on the Argyll County Council and on the Highlands and Islands Development Council. Meanwhile she was a serious botanist and gardener, and a practical farmer. She became a Labour representative in Argyll County Council from 1945 to 1966. She was a member of the Highland Panel from 1947 to 1965, and of the Highlands and Islands Development Consultative Council from 1966 to 1976.
Mitchison was a Life Fellow of the Eugenics Society. She was also a vocal campaigner for women's rights, advocating birth control, and active in local government in Scotland. Her own lack of knowledge about birth control led to her interest in the causes of birth control and abortion. She was on the founding council of the North Kensington Women's Welfare Centre in 1924. Today, she is best known for her advocacy of feminism and her tackling of then-taboo subjects in her writing. She was a principal investor in the Partisan Coffee House, a meeting place for the New Left off Soho Square, which functioned from 1958 to 1962.
Mitchison was also present and supporting a Stop the Seventy Tour rally, aiming to stop the apartheid South African rugby and cricket tours of Britain, in December 1969.

Later life

Dick predeceased her in 1970, but Naomi remained active as a writer well into her nineties. She was appointed CBE in 1981. In her old age she was constantly anxious and depressed about the future, particularly the misuse of scientific development such as nuclear arms. She claimed that to experience two world wars in a lifetime was too much. On the other hand, she never exhausted the Haldanes' eccentricity, and once remarked that her biography in Who's Who was "burning rubbish".
When asked on her 90th birthday whether she had any regrets in life, she replied, "Yes, all the men I never slept with. Imagine!"
She died at Carradale on 11 January 1999 at the age of 101 and was cremated at the Clydebank crematorium on 16 January. Her ashes were then scattered at Carradale.

Honours and recognitions

Autobiography

Mitchison's autobiography is in three parts: