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
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...
Education Antonia Fraser
AF (like the future Naomi Mitchison before her) attended the Dragon School in Oxford (a boys' preparatory school, taking children from about eight to thirteen). In her day it had twenty girls out of a...
Education William Empson
Sent to preparatory school at the age of seven, WE obtained the rest of his education on scholarships, first at Winchester School , where his schoolmates included future academics William Hayter and John Sparrow and...
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
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
Friends, Associates Bessie Head
In Francistown she again was able to draw on the generosity of friends who perceived her literary potential: Nini Ettlinger , who gave her, under the appearance of a loan, the money to buy a...
Friends, Associates Amabel Williams-Ellis
Shortly before coming out into society, Amabel and her family were invited to visit the Haldane family in Scotland. Here, she began a friendship with future scientist J. B. S. Haldane to the envy...
Friends, Associates Winifred Holtby
Through her work with the Six Point Group and Time and Tide, WH met the founder of both, Margaret Haig, Lady Rhondda . Their professional relationship grew into a friendship, and WH dedicated her...
Friends, Associates Stella Benson
SB met many writers during this stay in England. Her old friend Margery Spring Rice brought her together with Naomi Mitchison , who had recently approached her by letter.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
127-9
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
Jameson met Romer Wilson , Charles Morgan , and J. W. N. Sullivan through her Knopf connections. By about 1924 she and Edith Sitwell had visited each other's homes. Jameson felt that in spite of...
Friends, Associates Stella Benson
This summer she spent a holiday at Varengeville in Normandy, with Naomi Mitchison . She also met Sydney Schiff (at Chesham in Buckinghamshire), and on 31 August 1925 had her first meeting with...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ was mildly satirical about the left-wing and anti-monarchical tendencies of Naomi Mitchison (a well-known author of the times)
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
105
and the allegedly somewhat self-important Vera Brittain (who, felt Jenkins, had let the...
Friends, Associates Stevie Smith
SS developed lasting friendships with Naomi Mitchison and Rosamond Lehmann , both of whom reviewed her work. She was also close to US poet Naomi Replansky , with whom she corresponded before they met in 1969.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
298-9
Friends, Associates Phyllis Bentley
At a dinner party at Vera Brittain 's Chelsea house, PB met Naomi Mitchison , Cecil Roberts , and Ellen Wilkinson .
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Editor Bishop, Alan, Gollancz, 1986.
39-40
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

Timeline

1 September 1810-24 August 1811
James Hogg , the Ettrick Shepherd, anonymously published his Edinburghjournal, the Spy.
14 May 1920
Time and Tide began publication, offering a feminist approach to literature, politics, and the arts: Naomi Mitchison called it the first avowedly feminist literary journal with any class, in some ways ahead of its time.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
168
14 May 1920
Time and Tide began publication, offering a feminist approach to literature, politics, and the arts: Naomi Mitchison called it the first avowedly feminist literary journal with any class, in some ways ahead of its time.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
168
1928
Members of the British Federation of University Women (later known as the British Federation of Women Graduates ) established the Sybil Campbell Libraryfor the study of the expansion of the role of women in recent generations.
By early October 1930
London publisher Gerald Howe issued a composite biography entitled Six Women of the World, which had previously made up six volumes in a Representative Women series, 1927-9.
18 July 1936
The Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans (including Communists) and the Fascists led by Francisco Franco .
12 September 1936
Charlotte Haldane edited the first issue of Woman Today for the Women's Committee for Peace and Democracy .
By May 1937
Mass-Observation , a social research organisation devoted to observing the habits, behaviour, and opinions of ordinary people, was launched: Surrealist in inspiration, it became documentary and socially inclusive in aim.
3 September 1939
Britain and France officially declared war on Germany.
6 March 1957
The Gold Coast became the first British colony to achieve independent statehood, under the name of Ghana.
By May 1968
James D. Watson published The Double Helix, an account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the basis of human genetic material; he dedicated it to Naomi Mitchison .

Texts

Mitchison, Naomi. A Life for Africa: The Story of Bram Fischer. Merlin Press, 1973.
Mitchison, Naomi, and William Stubbs. African Heroes. Bodley Head, 1968.
Mitchison, Naomi. All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage. Bodley Head, 1975.
Mitchison, Naomi. Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945. Editor Sheridan, Dorothy, Gollancz, 1985.
Mitchison, Naomi. Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945. Editor Sheridan, Dorothy, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Mitchison, Naomi, editor. An Outline for Boys and Girls and their Parents. Victor Gollancz, 1932.
Mitchison, Naomi. As It Was: Small Talk . . . / All Change Here. Richard Drew, 1988.
Mitchison, Naomi. Barbarian Stories. Jonathan Cape, 1929.
Lewis, Wyndham, and Naomi Mitchison. Beyond This Limit. Jonathan Cape, 1935.
Mitchison, Naomi. Black Sparta: Greek Stories. Jonathan Cape, 1928.
Mitchison, Naomi. Black Sparta: Greek Stories. Jonathan Cape, 1931.
Mitchison, Naomi. Cleopatra’s People. Heinemann, 1972.
Mitchison, Naomi. Cloud Cuckoo Land. Jonathan Cape, 1925.
Mitchison, Naomi. Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hodder and Stoughton, 1967.
Mitchison, Naomi. Early in Orcadia. Richard Drew, 1987.
Mitchison, Naomi. Five Men and a Swan. Allen and Unwin, 1957.
Mitchison, Naomi. Images of Africa. Canongate, 1980.
Sutcliff, Rosemary, and Naomi Mitchison. “Introduction”. Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Hodder and Stoughton Library of Great Historical Novels, Hodder and Stoughton, 1967.
Sheridan, Dorothy, and Naomi Mitchison. “Introduction”. Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 15-24.
Mitchison, Naomi. Lobsters on the Agenda. Gollancz, 1952.
Mitchison, Naomi. Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Victor Gollancz, 1962.
Mitchison, Naomi. Mucking Around: Five Continents Over Fifty Years. Gollancz, 1981.
Mitchison, Naomi. Naomi Mitchison’s Vienna Diary. Victor Gollancz, 1934.
Squier, Susan M., and Naomi Mitchison. “Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult”. Solution Three, Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995, pp. 161-83.
Mitchison, Naomi. Not By Bread Alone. M. Boyars, 1983.