By the time Naomi Mitchison's best-known novel, The Com King and the Spring Queen, was published in 1931, she had a reputation as an unconventional and distinctive writer. It was her third novel, and she had also published several volumes of her short stories, a volume of poetry, and books for children. Her fiction was set in the past, but the tone and approach she adopted were fresh and challenging. She was dealing in modem issues, and with situations and emotions that were very much a part of her own life. The distinctiveness of her fiction was partly the result of combining a sensitive feel for historical environments with an idiom that was entirely contemporary.

In 1939 on the eve of war, Mitchison was living in a remote part of Scotland, having up to that time spent most of her life in Oxford and London. Bom in Edinburgh, she had never lost touch with her Scottish origins, but her intellectual roots appeared to be in Oxford. Her first books were concerned with the Classical world, with the clashes and confrontations of Ancient Greece, with the frontiers of the Roman Empire, with themes of aggression and power, the relations of friends and comrades, masters and servants, men and women. In the wake of the First World War, in which she lost many friends and nearly lost both her husband and her brother, she explored a world of raw violence and naked emotion, a distant world, but nevertheless vivid and clearly the same world as that which she was experiencing.

Her first novel, The Conquered, was published in 1923 when she was in her twenty-sixth year. Its originality and its uncompromising treatment of confrontation, sacrifice and sex gave it considerable impact. Set in the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul, it gained the respect of Classical scholars as well as capturing readers with its vigorous, straightforward narrative. The stories and novels that followed investigated the entanglements of the personal and political, located in an old world, but very much informed by the realities of a threatening present. The Conquered contained a message about British involvement in Ireland. The reiteration in several of her stories of the clash between Athens and Sparta stems from her increasing awareness of the seductive attractions of totalitarianism in Europe.