Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time. Edited by James Purdon. Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 174 pp. $120.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paperback); $24.95 (ebook).

Reviewed by Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina

Naomi Mitchison seems to have assumed the same significance for the current decade’s work in the Space Between that Rebecca West occupied during the society’s first years (or so I kept thinking as I made my way through James Purdon’s admirable collection) and for many of the same reasons. Like West, Mitchison was polymathic, political, long-lived, and multigenerically prolific, difficult to subsume into a narrative of modernism; for each, as Purdon says of Mitchison, “the variousness of her own writing may be one reason for its relative neglect” (3), and thus, also, for its attractiveness to a group seeking to complicate readings of the interwar period. Each writer’s oeuvre bears the marks of long and agonized grappling with the century’s intellectual and political currents; and each, as Purdon’s subtitle makes clear, was deeply attuned to the illuminatory possibilities of history for the present. If West’s distinctive contribution in this regard was the minatory palimpsest of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, for Mitchison it was the technique of “temporal double exposure” (10) as Purdon puts it, which shaped novels like The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), and, indeed, her later experiments in science fiction.

Time, for Mitchison, is a flexible concept—“a set of changing patterns: of evolving social arrangements, cultural traditions, languages, landscapes, technologies and genetic sequences” (6)— and it serves as a similarly loose organizing principle for Purdon’s collection. His excellent introduction—which offers a quick overview of Mitchison’s extraordinary life from her familial grounding in science and philosophy, her affinities with and differences from various modernist coteries, through her several immersions into various movements for social change, all in the service of a vision of “the possibility of human solidarity across time” (6)—provides needed coherence to a volume that could otherwise feel (understandably) scattershot. There’s always a challenge in attempting a cohesive overview-by-collection to the works of a writer as prolific as Mitchison (in an article on West, I once compared scholarship on her to the story of the blind men and the elephant) and Purdon describes previous publications on her in terms of their separation into discrete strands of her complexly woven career. Purdon has chosen here to limit the volume to Mitchison’s fiction, thus narrowing its scope somewhat by bracketing off her poetry, drama, and, in large part, her extraordinary range of essays and life-writing, which appear here largely as contextual source material. Though this is a sensible decision, it is also something of a pity—because if time is a key element shaping Mitchison’s work, so too is genre, and the essays here that make reference to it in the context of her novels (such as Lesley Hall’s, on Mitchison’s treatment of motherhood and reproductivity) could have been usefully complemented by one that, say, dealt with her Mass Observation diaries and retrospective memoirs in the context of experimental life-writing.

As it stands, Mitchison’s generic experimentation receives the most focused attention in the volume’s first essay, Leo Mellors’s exploration of her interwar short stories. Mellors cleverly positions these fragmentary and evocative experiments, such as her fantastical collaboration with Wyndham Lewis, Beyond This Limit (1935), as versions of the interwar documentary impulse—an aesthetic “dialectically connected to previously existing literary forms” (17) but provoked by non-literary forces. As such they not only connect Mitchison’s fiction with her work for Mass Observation but serve as a compact introduction to both her preoccupations and her aesthetic: her manipulation of estrangement, her “attempts to dive into Deep Time,” her insistence on “the gendered sensuality of existing in the world” (21, 20).

Nick Hubble, who has probably done more than any other single critic to refocus attention on Mitchison, has long recognized her role in generating and expanding genre; in his recent work, for example, he uses her as a stalking horse for a broader argument that claims much interwar women’s writing for an alternative trajectory of speculative fiction tied to the “fantastic romance.” Hubble’s essay here reads Mitchison’s best-known novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), in the context of her gender politics, and in particular, her “desire to push on” from the equal voting rights achieved in 1928 toward “a much more fundamental transformation of gender roles within society” (30). Mitchison’s emphasis, through her protagonist and alter-ego Erif Der, on a “new kind of sexually and socially liberated modern subjectivity” is more legible, Hubble argues, through the “intersectional imperatives” of today than in her own moment, where Der’s storyline was often ignored in favor of that of Tarrik, the “Corn King” (31), and the book seen primarily as historical fantasy. Notably, Hubble reads the novel in relation to three important political works by women from 1938: Virgina Woolf’s Three Guineas, Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution, and Mitchison’s own The Moral Basis of Politics—each, he argues, the “culmination of a train of thought” developed by each author over the course of a decade, a process to which the novel attests. Through Erif Der, and by way of “a sustained consideration of the relationships between art and practice, feminism and the class structure, and the center and the margins” (38), Mitchison is able to imagine a process of social transformation.

Hubble also touches here on Mitchison’s knotty and widely panned We Have Been Warned (1935), which appears in several of the volume’s essays, serving as a kind of touchstone text for the volume. One can see why: the illegibility of this volume in its time makes it almost a microcosm of Mitchison’s own. A thinly-veiled account of her own involvements in socialism, her travels in the USSR, and her sexual experimentalism, including her commitment to “altruistic sexuality” as a form of political engagement and comradeship in action, the novel was not only generically confusing—infusing a socialist realist narrative with elements of the supernatural—but, in 1935, objectionably frank, including as it does not simply active female desire, but rape, abortion, and bad sex. Following on from Hubble’s essay, Imogen Woodbury reads both The Corn King and the Spring Queen and We Have Been Warned in light of Mitchison’s involvement in interwar “consciousness” philosophies, especially the spiritual teachings of science writer/guru Gerald Heard. Intriguingly contrasting Mitchison’s version of the sexual “transgressive quest” with the individualist Lawrentian version, she sees the later novel as most successful in its “exploration of the complexity of harnessing the personal present in the service of a teleological goal” (51).

The other central chapters somewhat less successfully elaborate other interwar intellectual strands through an engagement with We Have Been Warned. Catriona Livingstone’s essay on Mitchison’s metaphorical use of popular scientific tropes traces these elements through the novel and “Beyond This Limit,” replaying many of the arguments of her recent Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity (2022) to suggest that “Mitchison constructs a form of scientific imagination rooted in women’s emotional life” (59). Lesley Hall offers a treatment of Mitchison’s depiction of motherhood and reproductivity, her “thinking against the grain of received ideas” about birth control and her conviction that intelligent women want both love and work, rather than “specializing like bees or machines” (75, 76); unfortunately, the rather clumsy shoehorning of Mitchison’s late science fiction novels into the essay without the context given the earlier works undermines both their analysis and the power of the overall argument. Similarly, Henry Stead offers a useful parsing of Mitchison’s attitudes toward and writings about the Soviet Union—quoting Hubble to explicate her as “a ‘Red’ in the sense of being committed to the revolutionary future rather than the liberal norms of bourgeois society” (93)—that later falters on matters of genre. He warns of indulging in “the delicate game of reading reality into Mitchison’s fiction,” and admonishes that her memoirs “tend to tidy up what might in that latter period be conceived as ideological infringements and/or embarrassments” (96)—yet when he moves to evaluating her second trip to the USSR in 1952 accords full truth-value to Doris Lessing’s retrospective account of the same period; he later misconstrues Mitchison’s private diaries as “reports” (97).

The three essays that examine Mitchison’s later work are all exceptionally strong. Megan Faragher’s treatment of the understudied The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) positions this novel of early Christianity as marking a distinctive shift in her use of historical setting, one rooted in her travels of the 1930s and especially her time among Depression sharecroppers in Arkansas. From a concern with “the more mystical elements of psychology,” Faragher argues, Mitchison’s novels register a shift to a more materialist, activist, view of history, “representing history as a series of punctuated political moments” (108). Adam Piette’s dense and intriguing essay on The Bull Calves (1956), makes clear, however, that moving away from mysticism, for Mitchison, did not preclude her deployment of the power of the fantastic; indeed, this historical novel of Scottish nationalism relies for much of the power of its erotico-political, palimpsestic vision on the dark threads of dream and “double secrecy” that complicate the coming together of the protagonists. Purdon’s own essay examines Mitchison’s anti-imperialism and support for the projects of African independence, bringing needed attention to her late African fictions even as it notes her self-acknowledged limitations and “the difficulties of inter-racial and anti-colonial solidarity” (146).

Purdon brings added value to the collection with the inclusion of the unpublished story “Europe,” written in the wake of the 1947 PEN conference in Zurich. In this story of a tasteless joke referencing the Holocaust, Mitchison forces the reader to inhabit an unempathetic narrator whose failures, Purdon suggests in a brief preface to the story, Mitchison offers up as perhaps indicative of the small-scale roots of dehumanization and genocide. That the story never found a publisher is perhaps not surprising; like Mitchison’s relentless and unflinching scrutiny of her own drives, contradictions, and affiliations, it requires readers to encounter impolite and difficult truths. Purdon’s volume does a great deal to ensure that those truths are legible to the scholars and readers of today.