Shameless Self-Promotion, or an Alexandrian abroad: my essay on Naomi Mitchison has just gone up over at Strange Horizons:
There are so many points of fascination in the long life of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) that one could probably write any number of biographical volumes concentrating on different aspects of her experiences without much danger of overlap. She was a socialist activist and birth control campaigner, and also a county councillor and politician's (later peer's) wife. She was a well-brought-up young Edwardian lady and scion of the famous Haldane family, who became an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. In her twenties she was a naïve young Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, caring for injured soldiers during the Great War; in her sixties she was the adoptive mother and advisor to a tribal leader in what would soon become Botswana. There is all this and still Mitchison the writer has not been reached; and even this subject might be (and frequently has been) subdivided into the writer of historical fiction, the writer of contemporary fiction, the writer of genre fiction or poetry or biography or political theory, the Scottish Renaissance writer or the voice of interwar women. Above all, as Lesley A. Hall puts it in Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work, her slim, excellent literary biography for Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series, Mitchison lived "an experimental life, trying out new ways of living and being that were only just becoming available to women" (Hall, p. 7). We might take this further, and suggest that Mitchison—in her reformist activism, in her political writings, in her time in Africa, and in her fiction—was interested more broadly in potential new and better ways of living for society at large. It is this thread that I shall follow through both Hall's biography and through a consideration of three of Mitchison's works: the fairy tale Travel Light (1952), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), and Not By Bread Alone (1983).
Interested? Go there to read the rest.
And should you feel so inclined, while you're there you can donate to the Strange Horizons 2008 fund drive, and help keep this fabulous online magazine going. :-)
~~Nic