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We Have Been Warned
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 discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced.
It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down.
Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
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 discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced.
It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down.
Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
- GenresFiction
582 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
88 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
160 books149 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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