Naomi Mitchison

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Standard Name: Mitchison, Naomi
Birth Name: Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane
Nickname: Nou
Nickname: Me
Married Name: Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison
Titled: Lady Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison
During her life of over a century (she narrowly missed living from the nineteenth into the twenty-first) NM averaged almost a book a year. She published novels, short stories, diaries, poetry, travel books, essays, and writing for children, all of them informed with the same vivid interest in the world around her and burning desire for its social betterment.
Black-and-white portrait of Naomi Mitchison. Her hair is pinned at the sides of her head in two buns and she is wearing a fuzzy sweater with two pom poms at the collar.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Dorothy L. Sayers
Q. D. Leavis disliked this novel, and wrote a scathing review of it and its successor, Busman's Honeymoon, in Scrutiny. Leavis attacked DLS 's reputation for literariness, holding it against her that...
Fictionalization Sappho
In the twentieth century Sappho continued full of potential for poets and prose-writers. Naomi Mitchison fictionalises her supposed school; Eavan Boland takes her as guide on an underworld journey (as Dante took Virgil); Jeanette Winterson
politics Dora Russell
It featured such speakers as Vera Brittain , Ethel Mannin , Naomi Mitchison , Marie Stopes , Desmond MacCarthy , Bertrand Russell , and G. B. Shaw . Papers given included DR 's Marriage and...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Among many personal replies was one from Naomi Mitchison , who visited Riding to argue that women are not innately inside but have been made so by being kept out of public activities, that politics...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Renault
Homosexuals in British fiction had been portrayed mostly as sick, funny, or both since the Oscar Wilde trials (1895). E. M. Forster had kept his Maurice unpublished. Radclyffe Hall had run into trouble. Virginia Woolf
Textual Production Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Occupation Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Women contributors ranged widely: Rebecca West , Stella Benson , Cicely Hamilton , Members of Parliament Lady Nancy Astor and Ellen Wilkinson , Virginia Woolf , Naomi Mitchison , E. M. Delafield , Rose Macaulay
Friends, Associates Ethel Mannin
EM entertained frequently at Oak Cottage, the house she bought after separating from her first husband. Visitors included Paul Tanqueray , Louis Marlow , Ralph Straus , Norman Haire , Fenner Brockway , and...
Anthologization Liz Lochhead
As well as reading her poetry at festivals and other venues, LL has selected and edited for Mslexia magazine in early 2004 a number of stories and poems on the theme of ice.
Lochhead, Liz. “Ice”. Mslexia, Vol.
20
, pp. 26-7.
26ff
Her...
Friends, Associates Doris Lessing
Her old friends included Naomi Mitchison (who shared her love of Africa), the composer Philip Glass , and her biographer and executor Michael Holroyd .
Murphy, Kim. “Lessing will have the last word”. Edmonton Journal, p. D3.
D3
Kennedy, Maev. “Doris Lessing dies aged 94”. theguardian.com.
Sage, Lorna. “Doris Lessing obituary”. theguardian.com.
politics Doris Lessing
She shared a room with writer Naomi Mitchison .
Friends, Associates Doris Lessing
At this time Lessing's friends included a number of writers: Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe , Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty, Naomi Mitchison , Ted Hughes , and R. D. Laing .
Diski, Jenny. “Doris and Me”. London Review of Books, Vol.
37
, No. 1, pp. 21-3.
21
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Q. D. Leavis
Here and elsewhere she published on a wide range of authors and literary topics, including Trollope , Hardy , Gissing , Forster , Orwell , and Aldous Huxley ; the Anglo-Irish, American, French, Italian, and...
Textual Production Q. D. Leavis
In her essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures, QDL also developed varied critiques of such authors as Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot , Charlotte Yonge , Marie Corelli , Edith Wharton , Naomi Mitchison , Amabel Williams-Ellis
Literary responses Annie Keary
The children of Charles Kingsley (whose own The Heroes, re-telling Greek mythological stories, had appeared a year before The Heroes of Asgard), were particularly keen on the Keary Norse collection.
Keary, Eliza. Memoir of Annie Keary. Macmillan.
125
A reprint...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Mitchison, Naomi. Other People’s Worlds. Secker and Warburg, 1958.
Barker, Ernest, and Naomi Mitchison. “Preface”. The Conquered, Jonathan Cape, 1954.
Mitchison, Naomi. Sea-Green Ribbons. Balnain Books, 1991.
Mitchison, Naomi. Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood. Bodley Head, 1973.
Mitchison, Naomi. Solution Three. Dennis Dobson, 1975.
Mitchison, Naomi. Solution Three. Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Africans. Blond, 1970.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Big House. Faber and Faber, 1950.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Blood of the Martyrs. Constable and Company, 1939.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Bull Calves. Jonathan Cape, 1947.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Cleansing of the Knife, and other poems. Canongate, 1978.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Conquered. Jonathan Cape, 1923.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Conquered. Jonathan Cape, 1966.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Jonathan Cape, 1931.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Delicate Fire: Short Stories and Poems. Jonathan Cape, 1933.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Delicate Fire: Short Stories and Poems. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Fourth Pig. Constable, 1936.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Home and a Changing Civilisation. John Lane, 1934.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Laburnum Branch. Jonathan Cape, 1926.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Moral Basis of Politics. Constable and Company, 1938.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Oath-Takers. Balnain Books, 1991.
Mitchison, Naomi. The Powers of Light. Pharos, 1932.
Mitchison, Naomi, and Lewis Gielgud. The Price of Freedom, A Play in Three Acts. Jonathan Cape, 1931.
Mitchison, Naomi. Travel Light. Faber and Faber, 1952.
Mitchison, Naomi. We Have Been Warned. Constable and Company, 1935.