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Naomi Mitchison was born in Edinburgh in 1897 and educated at
the Dragon School and St Anne's College, Oxford. As a member of the
Haldane family (her father was a noted physiologist and her brother
the famous genetic scientist and essayist J.B.S. Haldane), Naomi
Mitchison has been equally distinguished as one of the foremost
historical novelists of her generation.
In 1916 she married the Labour politician Dick Mitchison, later
Baron Mitchison, QC, and during their years in London she took an
active part in social and political affairs, including women's
rights and the cause of birth control. Her career as a writer began
with The Conquered (1923), a novel about the Celts whose approach
anticipated similarly imaginative reconstructions from later
writers of the Scottish Renaissance such as Neil Gunn, Grassic
Gibbon and Eric Linklater. Further novels were set in ancient
classical times, most notably The Corn King and the Spring Queen
(1931) which drew on her interest in myth and ritual and the
writings of J.G. Frazer. The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) brought
her hatred of oppression and a perennial concern for human decency
to a tale of the early Christian movement. She returned to Scotland
in 1937 to live in Carradale in Kintyre, and her novel The Bull
Calves (1947) deals with the years after the Jacobite '45 and the
Haldane family history at that time. Involved with local politics,
conservation and Highland affairs, she has also travelled widely,
and her long association with an African tribe in Botswana led to
her adoption as an honorary chief in the 1960s.
In a life full of cultural and creative commitment Naomi Mitchison
knew and corresponded with a host of fellow writers, including E.M.
Forster, W.H. Auden, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Neil Gunn.
There are over seventy books to her name, including biographies,
essays, short stories and poetry. Her entertaining memoirs have
been published as Small Talk (1973), All Change Here (1975) and You
May Well Ask (1970). She died in 1999.
* ... when a novelist is historically faithful in these treacherous waters of the human psyche, the results are tremendous. As a twentieth-century woman, it no doubt hurt Naomi Mitchison a good deal to describe the savagery of the early Christian persecution in The Blood of the Martyrs ... But it is the pain that gives the history its lifeblood. The imagination that is a novelist's fuel must be harnessed to serve history as history was, not as anyone wishes it had been. -- Joanna Trollope
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