Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison (; 1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote more than 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography.

Literary critic Geoffrey Sadler 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, Richard Hughes, 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 a perceived sympathy with 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.

Undoubtedly her most controversial work, We Have Been Warned, was published in 1935, based on a journey to the Soviet Union. In it she explored sexual behaviour, including rape and abortion. Her name was on George Orwell's list of people, prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department (IRD) set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government, who were considered to have pro-communist leanings and so be inappropriate to write for the IRD.

Mitchison's advocacy continued in other ways. She was councillor for the East Kintyre ward on Argyll County Council from 1945 to 1966. She initiated the council's school picture scheme under which a fund was established to purchase paintings by contemporary Scottish artists and loan them to schools. The paintings acquired included works by Joan Eardley, Robin Philipson, Anne Redpath and William MacTaggart.

Mitchison was a vocal campaigner for women's rights, advocating birth control, and was elected a Life Fellow of the Eugenics Society in 1925 before leaving in objection to the group's politics. In her old age she was anxious and depressed about the future, particularly the misuse of scientific development such as nuclear arms. She stated 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 in her biography in Who's Who that her recreation was "burning rubbish".

When asked on her 90th birthday whether she had regrets in life, she replied: "Yes, all the men I never slept with. Imagine!".

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 there.

Honours and recognitions Honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 1976 Snake! (1976) Two Magicians (with Dick Mitchison, 1979) The Vegetable War (1980) Not by Bread Alone (1983) Early in Orcadia (1987) Images of Africa (1980) 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) The Delicate Fire (1933; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2012) 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) Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison (Scottish Academic Press, 1986; reprinted, with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Kennedy & Boyd, 2008) A Girl Must Live: Stories and Poems (poems) (1990) The Oath-Takers and Sea-Green Ribbons (Kennedy & Boyd, 2021) Barbarian Stories and The Hostages and Boys and Girls and Gods (Kennedy & Boyd, 2021)

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 Other People's Worlds : Impressions of Ghana and Nigeria; and Mucking Around : Five Continents Over Fifty Years (Kennedy & Boyd, 2021) Bridges of Understanding: African Heroes and Images of Africa (Kennedy & Boyd, 2022) Essays and Journalism 1 - The Early Years, and Reminiscing (Kennedy & Boyd, 2009; reprinted 2023) Essays and Journalism 2 - Carradale (Kennedy & Boyd, 2009; reprinted 2023), edited and introduced by Moira Burgess Essays and Journalism 3 - Scotland (Kennedy & Boyd, 2023) Essays and Journalism 4 - Botswana (Kennedy & Boyd, 2023) Essays and Journalism 5 - Abroad (Kennedy & Boyd, 2023) Essays and Journalism 6 - Politics (Kennedy & Boyd, 2023, includes the complete text of The Moral Basis of Politics) Essays and Journalism 7 - Education, Literature and Philosophy (Kennedy & Boyd, 2023)

Marriage and family 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 (on 5 October 1964) a life peer 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.

Dick and Naomi Mitchison's marriage was not wholly satisfactory. After some years they both agreed to an open marriage, in which they entered into several other relationships that were conducted with dignity and described with humour. Her first serious lover was the Oxford classicist Theodore Wade-Gery, whose scholarship she drew on in writing her historical novels. As described in her autobiography, You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940, she fell deeply in love with Wade-Gery. She wrote him love poems and missed him greatly after he broke off the relationship, considering it incompatible with his marriage to another woman in 1928. She mitigated her sorrow by undertaking a risky mission to help persecuted socialists in fascist-dominated Austria. Later, she had several briefer, less intense affairs, in which the men were in love with her and she did her best to reciprocate. As she emphasized in describing these, she took care to use contraceptives with her lovers and to let her children be fathered by her husband alone – although she dreamed of a future in which her daughters would be able to "have children by several chosen fathers, uncensured".

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 (1928–2022), both professors of zoology. Their three daughters were Lois (born 1926), Valentine (born 1928), and Clemency, who died in 1940, shortly after her birth.

Between 1923 and 1939, they lived at Rivercourt House, Upper Mall, 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.