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 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.
A poet, Robert Nichols
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.
127
It is...
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.
153-4
Looking back in 1979 Mitchison characterised Smith's style as witty, full of meaning, one-off from a packed...
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...
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
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.)...
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...
politics Virginia Woolf
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 .
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...
Publishing Stella Benson
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
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 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 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...

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.