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Beyond This Limit
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.
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.
88 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1935
12 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
163 books137 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 26, 2020
Picked up this collection because of the recommendation for Travel Light in This is How You Lose the Time War. My library didn't have Travel Light—but it did have this!
There's an everythingness to Mitchison's writing that I find hard to describe. It seems like she's trying to drill down to find some sort of core truth to human nature in each of the stories collected here. I loved the socialist bent of many of the stories (most prominent perhaps in The Wife of Aglaos) and was less enthused by some of the musing on men and women and how they're bound to interact and/or relate to each other. In the 'drilling down to some core truth' there was plenty of sexual violence, but no mention or hint of alternate gender identities or sexualities. Still, if my main complaint about stories written decades and decades ago is heteronormativity the stories must hold up pretty well—plus, I only minded so much because some of the other 'truths' were so well depicted.
This collection takes the reader to human prehistory, to tribes in the south of Africa, to Paris, to the highlands of Scotland both in the heyday of the clans and after a nuclear war, and Ancient Greece besides. There's lots to unpack and analyse, even for this fairly non-analytical reader. I'll be seeking out more of Mitchison's work in the future; she makes me think.
There's an everythingness to Mitchison's writing that I find hard to describe. It seems like she's trying to drill down to find some sort of core truth to human nature in each of the stories collected here. I loved the socialist bent of many of the stories (most prominent perhaps in The Wife of Aglaos) and was less enthused by some of the musing on men and women and how they're bound to interact and/or relate to each other. In the 'drilling down to some core truth' there was plenty of sexual violence, but no mention or hint of alternate gender identities or sexualities. Still, if my main complaint about stories written decades and decades ago is heteronormativity the stories must hold up pretty well—plus, I only minded so much because some of the other 'truths' were so well depicted.
This collection takes the reader to human prehistory, to tribes in the south of Africa, to Paris, to the highlands of Scotland both in the heyday of the clans and after a nuclear war, and Ancient Greece besides. There's lots to unpack and analyse, even for this fairly non-analytical reader. I'll be seeking out more of Mitchison's work in the future; she makes me think.
Displaying 1 of 1 review