Naomi Mitchison facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Naomi Mitchison CBE
Naomi Mitchison, photographed in about 1920
Born	Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane (1897-11-01)1 November 1897 Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	11 January 1999(1999-01-11) (aged 101) Carradale, Scotland
Occupation	Biologist, nurse, writer
Language	English
Education	Society of Oxford Home Students
Period	1914–15
Genre	Historical, science fiction, travelogue and autobiography
Spouse	Gilbert Richard Mitchison
Children	Geoffrey Mitchison (1918–1927) Denis Mitchison (1919–2018) Murdoch Mitchison (1922–2011) Avrion Mitchison (born 1928) Lois Mitchison Valentine Mitchison Clemency Mitchison
Relatives	John Scott Haldane (father) J. B. S. Haldane (brother)

Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE (née Haldane; 1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical fiction, science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. She was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1981. The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.

Interests

Like her father John Scott Haldane and elder brother J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Haldane initially pursued a scientific career. From 1908, she and her brother looked into Mendelian genetics. Their 1915 publication was the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. However, whilst she was a diploma student at the Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College, Oxford), the outbreak of the First World War changed her interest to nursing.

Biography

Childhood and family background

Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane was born in Edinburgh, the daughter and younger child of the physiologist John Scott Haldane and his wife (Louisa) Kathleen Trotter. Naomi's parents came from different political backgrounds, her father being a Liberal and her mother from a Conservative, pro-imperialist family. However, both were of landed stock; the Haldane family had been feudal barons of Gleneagles since the 13th century. Today the best-known member of the family is probably Naomi's elder brother, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), but in her youth her paternal uncle Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, twice Lord Chancellor (from 1912 to 1915 under H. H. Asquith, and in 1924 during the first Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald), was better known.

Naomi followed her brother to the Oxford Preparatory School (later Dragon School) in 1904–1911, as the only girl there. From 1911, she was tutored at home by a governess. She qualified for the University of Oxford in 1914, via the Oxford higher local examination and entered the Society of Oxford Home Students (later renamed St Anne's College) to pursue a degree course in science. Before she completed the course she chose to become a nurse, for the First World War had broken out. After completing a course of first aid and home nursing in 1915, she joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Thomas's Hospital, London. Her service was much curtailed after she caught scarlet fever.

The Haldanes were known for their self-styled domestic experiments. She and her brother John started investigating Mendelian genetics in 1908. They initially used guinea pigs as experimental models, but changed to mice as they were more convenient to handle. Their findings were published as "Reduplication in Mice" in 1915. This was in fact the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals.

Marriage and family life

On 11 February 1916, Naomi married the barrister Gilbert Richard Mitchison (23 March 1894 – 14 February 1970), who was a close friend of her brother. Mitchison was then on leave from the Western Front; like her, he came from a well-connected and wealthy family. He became a Queen's Counsel, then a Labour politician, and eventually a life peer on 5 October 1964 as Baron Mitchison of Carradale in the County of Argyll, on retirement for his political work. Naomi thus became Lady Mitchison as the wife of a life peer, but she objected to the title. She played an active part in her husband's political career and in his constituency duties.

Naomi and Dick had seven children. Their four sons were Geoffrey (1918–1927), who died of meningitis, Denis (1919–2018), a professor of bacteriology, Murdoch (1922–2011), and Avrion (born 1928), both professors of zoology. Their three daughters were Lois, Valentine, and Clemency, who died in 1940, shortly after her birth.

Between 1923 and 1939, they lived at River Court House, Mall Road, Hammersmith, London. They bought the Carradale House at Carradale in Kintyre in 1939, where they lived for the rest of their lives. The house was frequented by people of all sorts: lords, ladies, politicians, writers, neighbours, fishermen and farmers. She and Denis MacIntosh, a local fisherman, wrote a documentary, Men and Herring: A Documentary, in 1949. Ten years later this was adapted for BBC Television as a docudrama, Spindrift.

Literary career

Mitchison was a prolific writer, completing more than 90 books in her lifetime, across a multitude of styles and genres. These include historical novels such as her first novel The Conquered (1923), set in Gaul in the 1st century BC, during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and her second novel Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925) set in 5th-century BC Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War. Her best work is considered to be The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931). Terri Windling described it as "a lost classic". Literary critic Geoffrey Sadler has stated of Mitchison's historical fiction: "On the basis of her early writings, she is unquestionably one of the great historical novelists."

In 1932, Mitchison was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to edit a guide to the modern world for children. Mitchison's book, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents, included several distinguished contributors, including W.H. Auden, Gerald Heard, and Olaf Stapledon. On publication, An Outline was praised by The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the London Mercury. However, several clergymen, including the Archbishop of York, were angered by the book's lack of emphasis on Christianity, while other right-wing authors objected to what they claimed was a sympathetic attitude to the Soviet Union. The Conservative writer Arnold Lunn wrote a lengthy attack on the book in the English Review, which contributed to its commercial failure.

Mitchison was a compulsive writer, as her travelogues would reveal. She would write on planes or in trains as prompted by the situation. For example, she wrote up a visit to the US in the 1930s, objecting to sharecropping.

After her husband's death, Mitchison wrote several memoirs, published as separate titles between 1973 and 1985. She was also a good friend of the writer J. R. R. Tolkien, and one of the proof readers of The Lord of the Rings. Maxim Lieber served as her literary editor in 1935.

Later life

Bust of Naomi Mitchison, located in South Gyle, Edinburgh

Dick predeceased her in 1970, but Naomi remained active as a writer well into her nineties. She was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1981. In her old age she was constantly anxious and depressed about the future, particularly the misuse of scientific development such as nuclear arms. She claimed that to experience two world wars in a lifetime was too much. On the other hand, she never exhausted the Haldanes' eccentricity, and once remarked that her biography in Who's Who was "burning rubbish".

She died at Carradale on 11 January 1999 at the age of 101 and was cremated at the Clydebank crematorium on 16 January. Her ashes were then scattered at Carradale.

Honours and recognitions

• Honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 1976
• Honorary LLD (Doctor of Law) from the University of Dundee, Scotland, in 1985
• Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1990
• DLitt from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, in 1983
• Elected Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1980, and Wolfson College in 1983
• CBE (Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1981
• James Watson (winner of 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) wrote much of his book The Double Helix while staying with the Mitchisons, and dedicated it to her.

Published works

Autobiography

Mitchison's autobiography is in three parts:

• Small Talk: Memoirs of an Edwardian Childhood (1973; reprinted, with an introductory essay by Ali Smith, Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage (1975) [Small Talk and All Change Here were republished as a single volume As It Was: An Autobiography 1897–1918 in 1975]

• Mucking Around (1981)
• Among You Taking Notes. The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison (1986) (Autobiographical sketches from Mitchison's diaries during the Second World War, written for "Mass Observation", selected and edited by Dorothy Sheridan.)

Novels

• Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2011)
• The Hostages (1930)
• The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931)
• Boys and Girls and Gods (1931)
• The Price of Freedom (1931)
• Powers of Light (1932)
• The Delicate Fire (1933; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2012)
• Beyond this Limit (1935; 'Pictures by Wyndham Lewis and Words by Naomi Mitchison')
• We Have Been Warned (1935; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2012)
• The Blood of the Martyrs (1939; reprinted in 1989)
• The Bull Calves (1947; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2013)
• The Big House (1950; reprinted, with an introduction by Moira Burgess, Kennedy & Boyd, 2010)
• Travel Light (Faber and Faber, 1952; Virago Press, 1985; Penguin Books, 1987; Small Beer Press, 2005; reprinted in the UK with The Varangs' Saga, and an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• Graeme and the Dragon (1954
• The Land the Ravens Found (1955)
• To the Chapel Perilous (1955)
• Little Boxes (1956)
• Behold Your King (1957; reprinted, with an introduction by Moira Burgess, Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• Judy and Lakshmi (London: Collins, 1959)
• The Young Alexander the Great (1960)
• The Rib of the Green Umbrella (London: Collins, 1960; illustrated by Edward Ardizzone)
• Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2011)
• The Fairy who Couldn't Tell a Lie (1963)
• Ketse and the Chief (1965)
• When We Become Men (1965; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• Friends and Enemies (1966)
• Big Surprise (1967)
• Family at Ditlabeng (1969)
• Don't Look Back (1969)
• The Far Harbour (1969)
• Sun and Moon (1970)
• Cleopatra's People (1972; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2010)
• Sunrise Tomorrow: A Story of Botswana (1973)
• Danish Teapot (1973)
• Solution Three (1975; reprinted with an afterword by Susan Squier, Feminist Press, 1995)
• Snake! (1976)
• Two Magicians (with Dick Mitchison, 1979)
• The Vegetable War (1980)
• Not by Bread Alone (1983)
• Early in Orcadia (1987)
• Images of Africa (1987)
• As It Was (1988)
• The Oath-takers (1991)
• Sea-green Ribbons (1991)
• The Dark Twin (with Marion Campbell, 1998)

Collections

• When the Bough Breaks and Other Stories (1924; reprinted by Pomona Press, 2006)
• The Laburnum Branch (1926)
• Black Sparta (1928)
• Barbarian Stories (1929)
• Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison (1935; Scottish Academic Press, 1986; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2008)
• The Fourth Pig (1936)
• Five Men and a Swan (1957)
• The Brave Nurse: And Other Stories (1977)
• Cleansing of the Knife: And Other Poems (poems) (1979)
• Images of Africa (1980)
• What Do You Think Yourself: and Other Scottish Short Stories (1982)
• A Girl Must Live: Stories and Poems (poems) (1990)

Plays

• Nix-Nought-Nothing: Four Plays for Children (illustrated by Winifred Bromhall, 1928)
• The Price of Freedom. A play in three acts (with Lewis Gielgud Mitchison, 1931)
• An End and a Beginning (1937)

Non-fiction

• Anna Comnena (1928; biography – reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• Vienna Diary (1934; reprinted by Kennedy & Boyd, 2009)
• The Moral Basis of Politics (1938; Reprinted 1971)

• Return to the Fairy Hill (1966)
• African Heroes (1968)
• The Africans: From the Earliest Times to the Present (1971)

• Oil for the Highlands? (1974)
• Margaret Cole, 1893–1980 (1982)
• Rising Public Voice: Women in Politics Worldwide (1995)
• Essays and Journalism. Volume 2: Carradale (Kennedy & Boyd, 2009), edited and introduced by Moira Burgess

See also

In Spanish: Naomi Mitchison para niños