This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable...
This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience ...
"The Bull Calves" was researched and written during the Second World War. This is very surprising, as Naomi Mitchison was tremendously busy at her home in Carradale, Kintyre, keeping open house for evacuees and refugees, running the farm and driving the tractor, organising the local Labour Party, and writing and producing for the dramatic society - and so on. She also wrote a diary for Mass Observation, of more than a million words. But she had to take her time with the novel and plan it more carefully than she usually had time for. She wanted to give Scotland and the world a message, of the...
"The Bull Calves" was researched and written during the Second World War. This is very surprising, as Naomi Mitchison was tremendously busy at her hom...
-The Year of the Short Corn- was first published in 1949, and the war, or its immediate aftermath, forms a presence in most of the stories. It can be a civilian family gathered together with scattered serving children for a precious Christmas leave, or a son or daughter returning from one of the services; it can illustrate clothes rationing, and the avid fervour with which civilian women greet silk stockings; it can be a 'townser' who thinks too much of himself who becomes snowbound on a North East farm, or the rage and humiliation of a young castrated ox. It can even be an Edinburgh...
-The Year of the Short Corn- was first published in 1949, and the war, or its immediate aftermath, forms a presence in most of the stories. It can be ...
Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters, but connected by their location in a particular corner of Orkney during the period known as the Stone Age. Mitchison links them formally by interpolating passages of fact and explanation between the fictional episodes, and by speculating in her own voice about what happened in prehistory, as far as it can be known from archaeological research, and how it fits in with the world of today. The slightly awkward jumps from one story to the next...
Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters,...
