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Anna Comnena
Naomi Mitchison. Edited and with an Introduction by Isobel Murray.
ISBN 9781849210294
SERIES The Naomi Mitchison Library
Paperback  106 pages
 
Published 25 November 2009    UK Price £12.95    US Price $17.95   

Anna Comnena is described as the first female historian, the author of her father's celebratory biography.
She was an educated princess in eleventh-century Constantinople, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius.
She was expected to succeed him, and raised as heir, but her hopes were dashed by the birth of a younger brother.
In what is over-modestly described as a biography, Naomi Mitchison combines her story with that of her father, and the whole civilisation of the Eastern Empire, indeed the whole known world of the time.
The Eastern Empire is seen as a necessary bulwark between a young and promising Europe and the perils of Islam and wild tribes in Asia.
Mitchison also warns her readership of the perils of a dead civilisation, and writing in 1928 she poses a challenge to the direction of Europe in these perilous postwar years. Thwarted ambition at last drove Anna to attempt to kill her brother, who, says Mitchison, went on to be one of the best of Emperors.

Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.


Naomi Mitchison [1897-1999] was a literary phenomenon.
Tireless in her writing, unafraid and often highly unconventional in her opinions, she left an extraordinary legacy.
Her novels for adults and children - based on the classical ancient world, and on the immediately contemporary - stressed at different times her deep interest in Scottish and African societies, as well her concerns for the future.
She also wrote poetry and plays, memoirs, a war diary, book reviews, political articles, and many letters.

 

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