Description
Book SynopsisNaomi 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 rit
Trade Review
... 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
