Possible worlds : the fiction of Naomi Mitchison

• Main Author: Smith, Donald
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1982
• Subjects: 820.90091
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.662135

Born in the eighteen nineties, Naomi Mitchison's literary inheritance was Edwardian, her personal and intellectual context that of the Haltiane Family who combined a Scottish background with Oxford science and the politics of the British Empire. Establishing her reputation as a historical novelist Mitchison moved on to attempt a monumental treatment of mythic themes in 'The Corn King and the S-iring Queen'(1931). Economic and political upheaval in the thirties shifted her fiction in a more pragmatic direction but, on the outbreak of World War II when Mitchison moved to Scotland and was caught up in the Renaissance movement, she returned to the literary treatment of myth in 'The 31il1 Calves' (1947). Mitchison's literary practice was deeply influenced by J.G. Frazer's 'The Golden 2E&I' and by the philosophical psychology of C.G.Junn. Broadly a philosom•hical romancer, a study of the part played in Mitchison's wo^: by anthropological ideas throws light both on the interaction between anthropology and the novel in twentieth-century literature, and on the nature of the Romance mode. The fruits of a long literary career are displayed not only in the major fictions but in the deceptively slight later Romances, notably 'Memoirs of a Spacedoman'(196?) which also brings Mitchison full circle to her earliest family influences.