Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison, CBE (née Haldane; 1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often referred to as the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books covering a wide range of genre including historical, science fiction, travelogue and autobiography. With her husband Gilbert Richard Mitchison becoming a life peer in 1964, she was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, but never used the title herself. She was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1981.
Following her father John Scott Haldane and elder brother J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison initially pursued a scientific career. From 1908 she and her brother started investigating Mendelian genetics. Their publication in 1915 became the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. But while a diploma student at Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College, Oxford), the First World War broke out that changed her interest to nursing.
Her novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is regarded by some as the best historical novel of the 20th century.
Naomi Mitchison was a vocal feminist, particularly campaigning for birth control. We Have Been Warned (1935) is regarded as her most controversial work due to explicit sexuality. The book was rejected by leading publishers and ultimately censored.

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 Tory and pro-imperialist family. However, both families were of landed stock, and the Haldane family had been feudal barons of Gleneagles since the 13th century, but were nevertheless known for their achievements in other spheres. 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 1912–1915 under Herbert Henry Asquith, and in 1924 during the first Labour government of Ramsay Macdonald), was better known.

Naomi followed her brother and was educated at the Oxford Preparatory (later Dragon) School, Oxford, during 1904 to 1911. She was the only girl. From 1911 she was home tutored by a governess. In 1914 she qualified for the University of Oxford 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 as 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 catching scarlet fever.

The Haldanes were known for their self-styled domestic experiments. With her brother John, she 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 Jack (John). He was then on leave from the Western Front of World War I, and like her, he came from a well-connected and wealthy family. Her husband 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. His wife Naomi thus became Lady Mitchison (as the wife of a life peer), a title to which she objected. Naomi played an active part in her husband's political career as well as in his constituency duties.

Dick and Naomi Mitchison's marriage was not entirely satisfactory, and after some years they both agreed to open marriage. Both she and her husband entered into several other relationships, which were conducted with dignity and described with humour. As described in her autobiography You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940, she had one lover with whom she had been deeply in love, to whom she wrote love poems and whom she greatly missed after he got married and considered that incompatible with continuing their relationship; this was in 1934 and she mitigated her sorrow by undertaking the 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 emphasizes in describing these affairs, she was always careful to use contraceptives with her lovers and 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 (born 1919, later a professor of bacteriology), Murdoch (born 1922), and Avrion (born 1928), both professors of zoology. Their three daughters were Lois, Valentine, and Clemency (who died in 1940 shortly after her birth).

They lived in London at River Court House, Mall Road, Hammersmith, between 1923 and 1939. In 1939 they bought the Carradale House at Carradale in Kintyre, 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 of fishing Men and Herring: A Documentary in 1949, which was later adapted as a docudrama Spindrift in 1959 on the BBC Television.

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) a story set in 1st century BC Gaul 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 The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) which treats three different societies including a wholly fictional one, and also frankly explores themes of sexuality (daring for its day). Terri Windling described it as "a lost classic". Literary critic Geoffrey Sadler has stated about 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 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 the book's sympathetic attitude towards the Soviet Union. Conservative writer Arnold Lunn wrote a lengthy attack on An Outline in the English Review. As a result of this negative publicity, An Outline was a commercial failure.

Undoubtedly her most controversial work, We Have Been Warned was published in 1935, based on her journey to the Soviet Union. In it she explored sexual behaviour, including rape and abortion. The book was rejected by various publishers. She approached first her friend Victor Gollancz (of Victor Gollancz Ltd.), who flatly turned her down as he observed that "publication of the book would cause a real outcry." The book was extensively rewritten to make it more acceptable to publishers, and was still subject to censorship. Upon publication it was universally despised for its depiction of rape, free love and abortion that "alienated readers on the left and horrified those on the political right." In 2005, files from the National Archives revealed the British government had considered prosecuting the publishers of We Have Been Warned, but ultimately decided not to.

She 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 her visit to US in the 1930s on her journey objecting about sharecropping.

Mitchison's 1938 book The Moral Basis of Politics was a treatise on ethics and politics that Mitchison had worked on over the last three years. In this book, she defended the right of left-wing journalist H. N. Brailsford to criticise the Moscow Trials, which had caused controversy on the British left at the time.

Mitchison's The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) is set against the background of Nero's persecution of the Christians; she draws parallels between Nero and contemporary dictators Mussolini and Hitler.

In 1952, she went to Moscow as a member of the Authors' World Peace Appeal. She went frequently to Africa, especially to Botswana, where she was made a sort of tribal mother (Mmarona) to the baKgatla people. Mucking Around (1981) best describes her haphazard travels in five continents over 50 years.

Later works included more historical novels The Bull Calves (1947) about the Jacobite rising of 1745 and The Young Alexander the Great (1960). She also turned to fantasy such as Graeme and the Dragon (1954) (Graeme Mitchison was her grandson through Denis); science fiction such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Solution Three (1975); fantasy such as the humorous Arthurian novel To the Chapel Perilous (1955), non-fiction such as African Heroes (1968), together with children's novels, poetry, travel and a three-volume autobiography. She was never certain of the actual number of books she had written (often claiming there were about 70). The articles were uncountable, from book reviews for the old Time and Tide magazine and the New Statesman to practical essays on farming, campaigning articles, recollections and reflections.

Maxim Lieber served as her literary editor in 1935.

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 she was one of the proof readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Activism

Mitchison, like her brother, was a committed Socialist in the 1930s. She visited the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a Fabian Society group, and expressed some misgivings about the direction of Soviet society. An active anti-fascist, Mitchison travelled to Austria, where she undertook the risky task of smuggling documents and left-wing refugees out of the country. She stood unsuccessfully as a Labour Party candidate for the Scottish Universities in 1935, at a time when universities were allowed to elect MPs. Eventually, as her political candidacy and her pro-Left writings had failed, she gradually became disenchanted with the Left. At this time she became politically attracted to Scottish Nationalism and increasingly wrote on specifically Scottish issues and themes. Her name was on George Orwell's list, a list of people prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government, considered to have pro-communist leanings and therefore be inappropriate to write for the IRD.

Mitchison's advocacy continued in other ways. She acted a spokeswoman for the island communities of Scotland, and became an advisor to the Bakgatia tribe of Botswana. She also took keen interest in the problems of Scotland and served on the Argyll County Council and on the Highlands and Islands Development Council. At the same time she was a serious botanist and gardener, and a practical farmer. She became Labour representative in the Argyll County Council from 1945 to 1966. She was a member of the Highland Panel from 1947 to 1965, and of the Highlands and Islands Development Consultative Council from 1966 to 1976.

Mitchison was a Life Fellow of the Eugenics Society. She was also a vocal campaigner for women's rights, advocating birth control, and was also active in local government in Scotland (1947–1976). Her own lack of knowledge about birth control (as stated in her memoirs) led to her interest in the causes of birth control and abortion. She was on the founding council of the North Kensington Women's Welfare Centre in 1924. Today, she is best known for her advocacy of feminism and her tackling of then-taboo subjects in her writing. She was a principal investor in the Partisan Coffee House, a meeting place for the New Left off Soho Square that functioned from 1958 to 1962.

Mitchison was also present and supporting a Stop the Seventy Tour rally, aiming to stop the apartheid South African rugby and cricket tours of Britain, in December 1969.

Later life

Statue 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 armaments. She claimed that an experience of two world wars in one's lifetime was too much. On the other side, she never ran out of the Haldanes' eccentricity, and once remarked that her biography in Who's Who was a "burning rubbish".

Inquired on her 90th birthday of her having any regret 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. She was cremated at the Clydebank crematorium in Glasgow on 16 January. The ashes were scattered at Carradale on the following day. She was survived by her three younger sons (all scientists) and her two elder daughters, and by 19 grandchildren.

• 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
• D.Litt. from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, in 1983
• Elected to Honorary Fellow of St. Anne's College in 1980, and Wolfson College in 1983
• Elected Member of the French Academy in 1924
• C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1981
• James Watson (winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) wrote much of his book The Double Helix while staying with the Mitchisons, and he dedicated it to Mitchison.

• "Mitchison, Naomi (Margaret)". The Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam™ Research, Inc. Retrieved 14 May 2014. 
• "Honorary Degrees: Doctor of Laws". The University of Dundee. Retrieved 14 May 2014. 
• [email protected]. "Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". www1.hw.ac.uk. Retrieved 2016-04-04. 
• McKie, Robin (9 December 2012). "DNA pioneer James Watson reveals helix story was almost never told". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved 15 April 2015.