Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood

Memoirs and Diaries #1

by Naomi Mitchison

Autobiographical view of a childhood in Oxford before the First World War, from the well-known novelist and poet. Illustrated with eight pages and black and white photographs and a family tree.

Genres: Autobiography, Memoir

132 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1973

About the author

Naomi 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

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naomi Mitchison lived from 1897 to 1999 and the range of things she did was breath-taking. She was a feminist who campaigned for birth control, helping to establish the first birth control clinics. Mitchison was a committed socialist and Scottish Nationalist as well as being a renowned historical novelist. A friend of Tolkien, she proofread Lord of the Rings. She also wrote fantasy and science fiction and a series of memoirs. Her early training was in science and with her brother she published the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals in 1915. She travelled a great deal and wrote a number of travelogues. Along the way she also had seven children.
This book is billed as a memoir of an Edwardian childhood (there are a few of those around). Mitchison takes much of what she writes from the diaries she wrote, freely admitting she has forgotten some of the incidents she describes (this was written in the 1970s}. There are a number of interesting lines of thought.
Mitchision’s father was part of the Haldane family, who were prominent liberals and scientists. Her mother was a Tory and an imperialist who supported Empire and Mitchison remembers the celebrations following the end of the Boer War. Her father had been opposed to the war. Mitchison records how she took on her mother’s beliefs quite naturally rather than those of her father.
She also records the beginning of the dualism that marked her later life. As a child Mitchison believed in ghosts and fairies like many of her contemporaries. She used these beliefs from childhood in her later writing of fantasy and science fiction. The scientific inheritance is obvious from the way nature is recorded and described.
The family moved around between Oxford, Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands and the book is really a series of snapshots of family life. I read it as a prelude to the next in the series, which will be part of my World War One reads.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Mitchison led such an interesting, out-of-the-ordinary life in Scotland. The icing on the cake for me was reading of life in the Edwardian era. Some authors one just wishes to be able to resurrect for more writing and this author is one of them.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am reading Mitchison's autobiographies despite having only the barest idea of her life and having barely read any of her fiction-- so far only Travel Light -- so I have very few pre-conceptions about who she is or what she cares about. I am not certain if this is to my advantage reading these books, but I am certainly finding Mitchison very interesting. This autobiography starts with her earliest childhood, and is I think more true to the experience of being a child in that it is organised by the things she cared about -- places, events, people, ideas -- rather than any attempt at chronological order or a narrative of development and growth. Instead she looks at her child-self from many different angles, and writes as much about the times and places and other people as she does about her own self. I found that it worked very well, and made me eager to continue to the next volume which is more about her adolescence, although I do wonder how much my general background in upper-class Edwardian England helped me to have context for what she writes about -- would it have been confusing without that background knowledge? Regardless, I enjoyed it, and I am well into the next one now, and looking forward to her novels as well.