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.
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...
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
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...
Leisure and Society
Evelyn Sharp
Apart from travelling and hiking together and discussing their respective writing, the couple had in common their pleasure in folk dancing. They were both members of the English Folk Dance Society
, founded by Evelyn's...
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.
298-9
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...
Literary responses
Stevie Smith
Looking back in 1979, Mitchison
expressed the hope that those who turned SS
down when she needed their help had felt really badly about it after she became known in the 1950s.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
158
Literary responses
Stevie Smith
Novel on Yellow Paper was an immediate critical success. Appreciation expressed in reviews by Naomi Mitchison
and Rosamond Lehmann
laid the foundations for SS
's friendships with these and other writers.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber.
125
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Naomi Mitchison
praised this collection in a review for Time and Tide from which a friendship developed.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
153-4
Looking back in 1979 Mitchison
characterised Smith's style as witty, full of meaning, one-off from a packed...
Literary responses
Rosemary Sutcliff
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
As a child Betty Coles (later ET
) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne.
2
At twelve...
Friends, Associates
Helen Waddell
Friends from HW
's time at Somerville
included Maude Clarke
, whom she had known as a child and whose Oxford position had been one of the incentives to go there, and archaelogist Helen Lorimer
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
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.)...
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.
