Sea-Green Ribbons

by Naomi Mitchison, Barbara Robertson (Illustrator)

In London, in Cromwell's time, when new ideas and beliefs are bursting from a background of religious zeal and political disillusionment, Sarah escapes from an intolerable marriage through the provinces to the hope and freedom offered by the New World of America.

Genres: Historical Fiction

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

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.

From 1937, Mitchison lived at Carradale in Kintyre 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.

Her first book, The Conquered, was published in 1923: her best known Scottish novel was The Bull Calves.

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

[Deborah Pickstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Levellers identified themselves by wearing the sea-green ribbons of the title. They were a fringe political movement during both English Civil Wars (which happened so close together that they are usually thought of as one war) that used pamphleteering and petition to promote their wishes for a fairer society and system: increased suffrage, popular sovereignty, equality under the law and reigious tolerance. As such they were not extremists but were accused of being so and eventually treated thus. This is a short novel about them. I have not read Naomi Mitchison before and plan to read more.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the memoir of Sarah Werden, born out of wedlock since her father, being an apprentice printer, could not marry. Sarah was brought up during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms as a Leveller, believing that “land should be divided so evenly out that every man or woman should have a fair and equitable share for living peaceably as did Adam and Eve before the fall,” her sea-green ribbons a sign that the wearer was against kings and bishops and lords of all kinds. When her father was time-served the family moved to the printers’ quarter of London, living next to Elizabeth Lilburne, wife of the former Parliamentarian Colonel who had begun writing pamphlets against how the new Cromwellian dispensation has turned out, that for the poor nothing has changed. Sarah too wonders, “How is it that the worst always comes to the top, as bubbles come up through milk boiling and burst?”

From her father she learned the printing trade but was married off to a coarse baker from whose philandering and abuse she soon felt forced to leave, finding refuge with a group of Diggers near Cobham but they are subject to the libel and scorn of the locals and driven out, whereon she fell in with a family of Quakers before eventually setting off for the New World.

Mitchison inhabits Sarah’s world for us impeccably, immersing us in the times with frequent mentions of Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Rainsborough and the Putney Debates, and with Sarah’s constant reflection on religion. It is all artifice of course, but the book is still noteworthy for the facility with which it was written considering Mitchison was in her nineties at the time. It was in fact her last novel to be published and makes for a fine epitaph.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful short novel about the radical fringe during the English Civil War, narrated by a young woman from a Leveller family, published when Mitchison was in her 90s - and can't have been written much earlier, since she cites Christopher Hill's work as the inspiration. Has her usual feeling for the kinds of things her characters would have taken for granted in historical context.