The books she wrote covered a wide range of areas such as historical fiction, science fiction, travel, autobiography, and poetry. She came from a well-known family in Scotland. She was a member of the Haldane family, and many of her family members were famous in various fields.
Scottish Naomi Mitchison was born in 1897. She wrote nearly a hundred works and became famous as the "doyen of Scottish literature". The books she wrote covered a wide range of areas such as historical fiction, science fiction, travel, autobiography, and poetry. She came from a well-known family in Scotland. She was a member of the Haldane family, and many of her family members were famous in various fields. Her father was physiologist John Scott Haldane and her older brother was biologist J B S Haldane. There were also important names among her other relatives. She was the child of a wealthy family and was raised by a governess. She won Oxford in 1914. While she was successfully continuing her academic career, World War I started. Due to the impact of the war, she decided to step into nursing without completing her education. After completing an accelerated nursing course, she started working as a volunteer at St Thomas' Hospital in London. After contracting the common disease of the period, "Red Red", she had difficulty in fulfilling her duties, and her nursing career was short-lived.
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison CBE (1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
She was someone who was interested in genetics. Together with her brother John Haldane, she conducted research on Mendelian genetics at home and conducted various experiments with mice. In 1915, she published an important study in genetic science. This scientific study, titled "Reduplication in Mice", would be one of the first examples of genetic linkage in mammals. On February 11, 1916, she married lawyer Gilbert Richard Mitchison, a close friend of her brother, and played an active role in her husband's political career. She rejected the title "Lady Mitchison" because she had no idea of being the "woman of the house". She became one of the iconic names of women throughout her life, which she spent with struggle and successful work in many fields.
She worked on women's rights throughout her life and brought women's issues to the agenda. Her work "We Have Been Warned" was among her most controversial works. Because this book covered topics such as free love, rape, and abortion, it received reactions from the public, and its book was censored. Although she was subjected to many negative reviews, her book was met with interest among women. Apart from topics such as ethics and politics, she also wrote children's books, travel books, and poems. Of course, it was not a coincidence that she was called "one of the best historical novelists" while she was alive. She has written many historical novels set in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. She also wrote a work in which she drew parallels between the Roman Emperor Nero, known as the "dictator" in ancient times, and the dictators of today's world such as Mussolini and Hitler.
He traveled haphazardly across five continents for fifty years and spent her life in activism. Naomi, a socialist, collected her observations and wrote criticism after her visit to the Soviet Union. She expressed concern about the direction of Soviet society. She was involved in political activities in many countries, especially Austria and Scotland. She adopted left-wing politics for a while and was a member of her country's Labor Party. In the following period, she turned to Scottish nationalism. She found a place in the list of people with "pro-communist tendencies" prepared by the British writer George Orwell in 1949.
Naomi's interests included botany, gardening, and farming. She served on Argyll County Council from 1945 to 1966, on the Highland Panel from 1947 to 1965, and on the Highlands and Islands Development Advisory Council from 1966 to 1976. In addition to all this, sailing into the waters of fantasy and science fiction brought her together with different audiences. She was a good reader of The Lord of the Rings, one of the cornerstones of fantasy literature, and also a good friend of its author, JRR Tolkien. Her novel "Memoirs of a Female Astronaut" offered an unprecedented example in science fiction literature. The work, which became a bestseller and a classic in a short time, focused on a female astronaut, as the name suggests. It was inevitable that Naomi, one of the flag bearers of the feminist movement, would center women in this novel. One of the factors that made the novel powerful was that it examined the concepts that were stereotyped and attached to women in society.
She was pessimistic about the future and worried about nuclear weapons. She often said, "Seeing two world wars in one lifetime is too much." She passed away in Carradale on January 11, 1999, at the age of 101.