During her long and creative life Naomi Mitchison has achieved a remarkable reconciliation between the practical everyday world and the realms of myth, remote cultures, and history. At the age of sixty she began to write about the future while continuing to produce, as she had during her entire writing life, poems, plays, books for children, reviews, essays, and articles on a variety of social, moral, and political themes. She has also published three volumes of memoirs.

Naomi Margaret Haldane was born on 1 November 1897 in Edinburgh to the physiologist John Scott Haldane and Louisa Kathleen Trotter Haldane. The Haldanes were an ancient Scottish family that had owned land near Gleneagles, Perthshire, for many generations. Naomi's mother assumed that her daughter would grow up to participate in conventional Edinburgh social life, as she herself had done during late Victorian times. John Scott Haldane held progressive social and political views...