Mitchison, Naomi Mary Margaret (1897-1999)

Scottish writer. She wrote more than 70 books, including The Conquered (1923), The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), novels evoking ancient Greece and Rome. A socialist activist, she also campaigned for birth control.

The settings of other novels range from prehistoric Scotland and the Holy Roman Empire to Africa (she was made a tribal adviser in Botswana in 1963) and even distant galaxies (Memoirs of a Spacewoman, 1962). She has also written short stories, plays, poetry, and five volumes of autobiography, culminating in As It Was (1988).

She was born in Edinburgh, the sister of the geneticist JBS Haldane, and brought up in Oxford. In 1916 she married G R Mitchison, a barrister who was made a life peer in 1964, and from 1937 lived in western Scotland, where she was active in local politics. For her historical novels, although she had little formal classical knowledge, she made great use of histories and translations to produce a clear, direct, unsentimental narrative; she also wrote a biography of the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena (1928). Mitchison went on publishing novels into her nineties.