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Naomi Mitchison published her first novel, The Conquered, in 1923. In her more than seventy succeeding books she has produced an extraordinary out-put, especially in the novel and the short story. This selection of the shorter fiction is intended to illustrate her range and achievement over more than fifty years. Beyond This Limit was the result of a unique co-operative partnership with illustrator Wyndham Lewis, and story and pictures are here first reproduced from the limited edition of 1935. The other contents range from a story of the cave painters of Lascaux, through Mitchison's major fictional preoccupations, ancient Greece, Scotland, Africa, to a story of post-holocaust Scotland first published in 1982. Central to all of them is a very individual intelligence constantly examining the politics of power in human relationships, including sexual ones. Edited with an Introduction by Isobel Murray, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. ... Read more

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Louisa 'Maya' Haldane was the widow of physiologist John Scott Haldane, and the mother of J. B. S. Haldane and Naomi Mitchison. In these memoirs she gives a remarkably detailed account of the life of the well-to-do in the second half of the nineteenth century - in Ireland, Scotland and the Con­tinental spas as well as in England - as seen through the eyes of a growing girl and an independently-minded young woman. The story continues up to the time of the First World War, with chapters focusing on particular topics: her education, her husband's early career, the position of servants in town and country, a young lady's wardrobe. We are reminded graphically of the high feeling that ran in the country during the Boer War, Queen Victoria's Jubilees and her funeral, all of which are still vivid in Mrs Haldane's memory. This fascinating material is informed and enlivened by a certain dry wit, nowhere more telling than in personal anecdote: particularly in the account of her father's experi­ences when, during a sea voyage for his health - always precarious through excessive perusal of medical literature - he unexpectedly found himself obliged to take over the duties of British Consul in Samoa. The author's objective irony, together with her remarkably clear and detailed memory for people and places, helps to re-create an ambience and moral climate of a now remote era. ... Read more

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In this unusual and accomplished novel Naomi Mitchison retells in realistic terms and colloquial dialogue the story of the passion and death of Jesus, hour by hour, as it unfolds over the twenty-four hours of Good Friday. In a restless Jerusalem under Roman occupation, political and personal agendas lead inexorably to the crucifixion, while the followers of Jesus - his mother, the fishermen, young Mary of Magdala - can only wait, unhappy and confused. Mitchison, probably inspired by the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-56, drew, in writing this novel, not only on the New Testament gospels but also on fragmentary or lost gospels and on tradition. Herself a humanist, she scrupulously presents 'the historical Jesus'. But at the end of the novel, as the disciples keep watch by the garden tomb, she leaves the reader with a question: what happened next?Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian who lives in Glasgow. She is the author of Mitchison's Ghosts (Humming Earth, 2008), on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is working on a collected edition of Mitchison's essays and journalism to be published by Kennedy & Boyd. ... Read more