Rosalind Mitchison


Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison.

Life

Rosalind Mary Wrong was born in Manchester. Her father, Edward Murray Wrong, and his father, George MacKinnon Wrong, were both historians. Her brother was Oliver Wrong.
She was educated at Dragon School in Oxford then studied history at Lady Margaret Hall and went to the University of Manchester as an assistant lecturer, working under Sir Lewis Namier, in 1943.
In 1953 her husband was appointed to a professorship at the University of Edinburgh and they moved to Scotland. Mitchison taught history, initially part-time, at Edinburgh until 1957. In 1962 she began teaching at the University of Glasgow where she remained until 1967, latterly as a full-time lecturer. Her first work, Agricultural Sir John, broke new ground in the history of 18th-century Scotland, hitherto mainly studied, when studied at all, from the perspective of the Acts of Union 1707 or the Scottish Enlightenment.
She returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1967 as a Reader, and was by 1981 Emeritus Professor of Social History, a post she held until 1986.
In 1994 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her proposers were T. C. Smout, D Stevenson, T. M. Devine, Michael Francis Oliver, Charles Kemball and D. E. R. Watt.
She died in hospital in Edinburgh on 19 September 2002.

Family

In 1947, while Tutor at Lady Margaret Hall, she married zoologist John Murdoch Mitchison, son of Naomi Mitchison and Dick Mitchison. They had four children, three daughters and one son.

Books and publications