August
2005: We are reprinting Travel
Light as the second title in our Peapod
Classics series. Small, cute, collectible!
NYTimes
obit
-- including hilarious spelling: "An obituary on Saturday about
Naomi Mitchison, the British writer and early feminist, misspelled
the surname of the Labor Party leader at whom she once threw a half-plucked
partridge. He was Hugh Gaitskell, not Gaitskill."
Books in print
as of October 2002:
Interview
with Naomi Mitchison, April 1989
Here's a short
essay on one of Mitchison's young adult novels, Travel Light,
that ran in F&SF in June 2001
My
staff
pick for BookSense.com in March
2001
Naomi
Mitchison Bibliography
Find books
by Naomi Mitchison on BookFinder.com
This
page is a placeholder. (Submissions welcome.)
Naomi
Mitchison was born in Scotland in 1897 and died at the
age of 101 in 1999. In the USA she isn't too well known, but I recommend
her, even if you have to search for some of her books. Judging by
the number of times it's been brought back into print, the most
popular of her historical novels is The
Corn King and the Spring Queen. Soho Press have put it out
under their Hera Series which includes novels by Cecilia Holland
and Gillian Bradshaw.
If
historical fiction isn't your thing, don't turn up your nose quite
yet, she also wrote science fiction (Solution
3, [Feminist Press], Memoirs of a Spacewoman), some
of the most enjoyable autobiographies I've ever read (You May
Well Ask, Small Talk), children's books (including the
wonderful Travel Light), plays (with Lewis Geilgud), poetry,
essays, short stories, and biographies; over 70 books in all.
Mitchison was
born in Scotland because her mother wanted a woman to attend her
at the birth which was difficult to find outside Edinburgh. Despite
her proto-feminist leanings her mother never managed to get beyond
her Tory beliefs and it wasn't until Mitchison was older that she
realized that she shared her deep Socialist views with her father.
Socialism has a long and respectable history in Scotland and does
not carry the same negative connotations that the media and populace
seem to fear in the USA.
From an early
age Mitchison seems to have been very self aware. Excerpts from
her early diaries in The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (Virago,
1997) by Jenni Calder and in her own autobiography show her as a
learned companion to her older brothers as they study science and
try to keep up with their father's work. Her family lived well.
Her father, J.S. Haldane, was a respected scientist and her uncle,
Richard Haldane, a cabinet minister during World War I. She lived
variously in Scotland and England until moving back to Scotland
in 1937 with her husband, the politician Dick Mitchison. She was
politically active all her adult life and came to the USA in the
1930's to see how the working class, poor and minorities were faring.
She also was well-connected in the arts and political world and
put her time into campaigning in support of her beliefs. She believed
in sexual freedom, women's rights and social justice. She was successful
enough in her own lifetime to be consistently published but despite
that and her family money problems plagues her well past the usual
retirement age.
This first ran
in Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop's Annotated
Browser.