Elspeth Huxley


Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE was an author, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government adviser. She wrote over 40 books, including her best-known lyrical books, The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard, based on her youth in a coffee farm in British Kenya. Her husband, Gervas Huxley, was a grandson of Thomas Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley.

Early life

Nellie and Major Josceline Grant, Elspeth's parents, arrived in Thika in what was then British East Africa in 1912, to start a life as coffee farmers and colonial settlers. Elspeth, aged six, arrived in December 1913, complete with governess and maid. Her upbringing was unconventional; she was "almost treated as a parcel, being passed from hand to hand". Huxley's 1959 book The Flame Trees of Thika explores how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were. It was adapted into a television series in 1981. Elspeth was educated at a whites-only school in Nairobi.
She left Africa in 1925, earning a degree in agriculture at Reading University in England and studying at Cornell University in upstate New York. Elspeth returned to Africa periodically. She married Gervas Huxley, the son of doctor Henry Huxley in 1931. They had one son, Charles, who was born in February 1944.

Careers

Huxley was appointed Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929. She resigned her post in 1932 and travelled widely. Huxley started writing soon after her marriage; her first book, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya about the famous white settler, was published in 1935.
Huxley's 1939 book Red Strangers describes life among the Kikuyu of Kenya around the time of the arrival of the first European settlers. The manuscript was sent first to the publisher Macmillan, but Harold Macmillan, then working for the family firm, agreed to publish it only with considerable cuts, including a graphic description of female circumcision. Huxley refused, and the book was published by Chatto & Windus. Huxley remembered: "It was indeed a happy day for me when our future Prime Minister couldn't take clitoridectomy." The book was republished by Penguin Books in 1999 and again by Penguin Classics in 2000; Richard Dawkins played an important role in getting the book republished, and wrote a preface to the new edition.
Her final tally of 42 books included the ten works of fiction and 29 non-fictional books, as well as thousands of pamphlets and articles.
During the Second World War, Huxley was a broadcaster for the BBC.
In 1960, Huxley was appointed an independent member of the Advisory Commission for the Review of the Constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Early in life an advocate of colonialism, she later called for independence for African countries.
In the 1960s, she served as a correspondent for the National Review magazine.
Christine S. Nicholls wrote Elspeth Huxley: A Biography. Huxley was a friend of Joy Adamson, the author of Born Free, and is mentioned in the biography of Joy and George Adamson entitled The Great Safari. Elspeth Huxley wrote the foreword to Joy's autobiography The Searching Spirit.

Death

Huxley died on 10 January 1997 aged 89, in a nursing home at Tetbury in Gloucestershire, England.

Honours

Fiction

A collection of twelve boxes of photographs, prints, negatives, contact prints and slides is held at Bristol Archives in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection. Most of the photographs were taken by Huxley, with the rest collected by her. The collection covers Huxley's whole career and subject matter includes Kenyan safari landscapes and local people, the Mau Mau uprising, white settlers, Edwardian Mombasa, and a transcript of an oral history interview taken by the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum . Other collections related to Elspeth Huxley can be found at the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts and University Archives.