Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Naomi Mitchison
-
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.
The publishers had many laudatory quotes to use in their advertising for this book, including some from other historical novelists: Mary Renault
and Naomi Mitchison
. David Holloway
praised it in the Daily Telegraph as...
Literary responses
Helen Waddell
The book evoked a chorus of praise. Walter de la Mare
wrote to Otto Kyllmann: She writes about poetry absolutely unknown to me, in a fashion that is in itself poetry.Kyllmann
wrote to HW
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...
Occupation
William Empson
WE
was an enthusiast for Basic English (a simplified form of the language which he favoured not only for exchanges among scientists and others from different language groups, but also as an introduction to the...
On 10 May Germany had invaded Holland and Belgium. In the event of an invasion of England, they could indeed expect a terrible personal fate, on account of their anti-war politics, Leonard's anti-war career and...
politics
Doris Lessing
She shared a room with writer Naomi Mitchison
.
politics
Barbara Cartland
BC
was one of Ronald
's chief supporters in his brief career as a Conservative MP: she joined him on public campaigns, advised him informally on speechwriting and networking, provided him with a deposit of...
politics
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Warner and Ackland were members of publisher Victor Gollancz
's Left Book Club
, and wrote assiduously for left-wing papers and magazines. (After the second world war, however, Ackland developed divergent and comparatively right-wing views.)...
Among SB
's journalism, her articles published in The Star and the Athenæum were particularly admired by Naomi Mitchison
.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
127-8
Publishing
Dorothy Whipple
DW
must have been writing and publishing stories before her first novel appeared, since she was working on High Wages when her Miss Boddy was printed in Everyman and she recorded it as her first...
Textual Features
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World (titled from the words of Shakespeare
's Miranda on her first sight of human social community) is in some ways remarkably prescient, in its forecast of extra-uterine pregnancy and a universal drug...
Textual Features
Bessie Head
She dedicated it to Naomi Mitchison
, who loves Botswana.
Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head. Wits University Press.
109
Elements in this fiction refract recent developments in BH
's own life: her male protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, owes something to her husband's story and...
Textual Production
Stevie Smith
Even after her first volume of poetry appeared, SS
had trouble finding outlets. In 1938 she sent Naomi Mitchison
a poem entitled Goodnight (beginning Miriam and Horlick spend a great deal of time putting off...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Mitchison, Naomi. What do you think yourself? Scottish short stories. Paul Harris, 1982.
Mitchison, Naomi. When the Bough Breaks, and Other Stories. Cape, 1924.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
