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
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 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
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 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...
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.
qtd. in
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
2
At twelve...
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 E. M. Forster had kept his Maurice unpublished.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
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...
Literary responses Stella Benson
The Nation and Athenæum said that this novel was a little masterpiece.
qtd. in
Benson, Stella. Tobit Transplanted. Macmillan, 1931.
363
Naomi Mitchison , who had not yet met SB , was moved when she read this book to send a fan letter:...
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...
Literary responses Stella Benson
Forty-six years after Benson's death, Naomi Mitchison acknowledged that her work had ceased being read, that her fantasy was misunderstood as whimsy. She felt, however, that in 1979 a revival was due.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
127
It is...
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, 1979.
158
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, 1882.
125
A reprint...
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, 1988.
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, 1990.
A poet, Robert Nichols
Literary responses Stevie Smith
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, 1979.
153-4
Looking back in 1979 Mitchison characterised Smith's style as witty, full of meaning, one-off from a packed...
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...

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. 1st ed., 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.