Worldly perils held no fear

Naomi Mitchison had barely drawn her last breath this week before being hailed as ''Scotland's greatest woman writer''. According to her biographer, Jenni Calder, it was an accolade she would have hated.

''Her view would have been that either she was a great writer or she wasn't. She didn't want to be called a woman writer,'' says Calder.

In recent years there have been a number of attempts to claim Mitchison for the feminist cause. Yet, though the author has on occasion happily sported that label, it is such a partial description of this multi-faceted, multi-talented formidable lady that it sits oddly on her.

''First and foremost she was a socialist,'' says Calder, adding: ''Her feminism was part of her socialism, not the other way round.''

For instance, her involvement in the 1930s with Britain's second birth control clinic (she sat on the management committee and even experimented on herself with new devices), came largely out of her desire that working-class women should control the number of children they had. Through that involvement she saw the social and economic impact such simple measures could make to women whose lives and prospects would otherwise be blighted by a draggle of children.

Despite her background, which was both socially elite and very liberal, she had been made painfully aware of the exclusion faced by women, when, following the onset of menstruation, she was tutored at home, while her brother Jack went off to Eton.

Right up to the time she married Dick Mitchison at 18, she was made to sleep in her mother's room.

Once her husband returned from the trenches, they soon realised that neither of them knew anything about sex. Their solution was to track down a copy of Marie Stopes's book Married Love. Typically, she developed a consuming interest in the subject which manifested itself not only in her involvement in the birth-control movement but also her writing.

Isobel Murray, reader in English at Aberdeen University and a Mitchison enthusiast, says: ''She became interested in subjects like rape and abortion. For a long time she got away with discussing sex because she was writing historical novels.''

Behind this front she was able to explore concepts which even today many would consider too radical to contemplate. One short story involved a Greek woman taken slave only to find herself living with nine men. Her solution is to spread her favours among all of them. In another, the Hunting of Ian Ogg, feuding Highlanders are inveigled into marrying the women they have raped and impregnated.

In her space fiction novel, Solution Three, most women are freed from the uncertainties of motherhood by cloning. ''Above all, she was pragmatic. She believed that if you accept the perils of this world, you go from there,'' says Murray.

It was only when she moved into the present that her work began to provoke an outcry from the male establishment. We Have Been Warned, which includes open references to birth control and depictions of rape and abortion, remained unpublished for several years, then appeared in a bowdlerised form. One publisher described it as ''filthy''.

Mitchison was both affronted and upset by the response, once saying: ''When you're wearing togas it's all right but rubber goods, that's something else.''

One of the worldly perils Mitchison appears to have accepted cheerfully was male infidelity. When her husband's eyes began to stray, her response was to take her own lovers. ''They both had lots of lovers, yet as a pair they were closer than 95% of couples,'' says Murray. ''When they were apart they wrote every day and shared care of the children. They agreed that there would be no jealousy, and it worked. It must be one of the great marriages of the twentieth century.''

If Mitchison was a feminist, she certainly wasn't an orthodox one and wasn't beyond using a spot of feminine guile when it suited her. In one delightful self-portrait she recalled going up to St Andrews House during her time as a member of the Highland Panel and bursting into tears on the shoulder of Scottish Secretary Arthur Woodburn. Afterwards she observed wryly that she never made the mistake of crying twice, at least not on the same floor of St Andrews House.

During the 1930s, when living in England, she had been considered an internationally important writer. After she and Dick moved to Carradale on the Mull of Kintyre, in 1937, her star began to fade.

''She never had the contemporary reputation as a Scottish writer she had enjoyed as an English writer,'' says Calder. She believes this was because of the dominance of the cultural scene by men. ''She simply didn't get a look in.''

Today Mitchison is being rediscovered by a new generation, many of them women looking for female iconic figures. Says Calder: ''She's a godsend if you're trying to prove that there are good woman writers. I hope this move to identify her as a significant woman writer will move on to the realisation that she was a significant writer full stop.''