Kenya - History, British Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Radio Biography, Television & Radio - Biography

Elspeth Huxley

Name: Elspeth Huxley
Author: C. S. Nicholls
ISBN: 9780312300418

by C. S. Nicholls

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Overview

Elspeth Huxley, who died in 1997, is chiefly remembered for her lyrical and evocative memoir The Flame Trees of Thika (1959). Yet this was only one of the thirty books she wrote, and it took just a few months of her remarkably active life to compose.

A woman of compelling personality and exceptional energy, Elspeth Huxley was not only a celebrated writer, but also a farmer, broadcaster, journalist, conservationist, political thinker, magistrate, and government adviser. She was a vivid chronicler of colonial Kenya, and became increasingly recognized as an observer and interpreter of African affairs over a period of profound change. Initially a staunch defender of the white settlers, she would later come to support moves toward African independence.

After a childhood spent in East Africa and wartime Britain, Elspeth married a grandson of Thomas Huxley and cousin of Aldous Huxley, whom she knew well. Her wide circle also later included George and Joy Adamson, the Leakeys, and Peter Scott (whose biography she wrote). Whatever their subject, her books reveal the adventurousness, warmth, perception, and occasional astringency that made up her own personality; they are also notable for their acute observation and great social range, encompassing the lives of Kenya’s poor white farmers, the frivolous Happy Valley set, and Africans alike.

For this, the first biography of Elspeth Huxley, C. S. Nicholls has made extensive use of her papers and letters—-including those to and from Elspeth’s formidable mother Nellie and her hapless father Jos. Elspeth Huxley: A Biography is not merely a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary woman, but an absorbing account of an entire era of colonial and British history.

About the Author, C. S. Nicholls

Christine Nicholls grew up in East Africa and knew many of the people in Elspeth Huxley's circle. She was coeditor and then sole editor of The Dictionary of Natural Biography for twenty years, and also edited The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Biography. Her other books include The Swahili Coast, Cataract, Power: A Political History of the Twentieth Century, a biography of David Livingstone and the official history of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She lives in Oxford.

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Editorials

The New York Times

C. S. Nicholls's engaging biography, which draws on an extensive collection of Huxley's published work, personal papers and letters, expertly places Huxley's life and work in the context of the dramatic rise and fall of Britain's African empire.—Laura Ciolkowski

Publishers Weekly

This first biography of British writer and conservationist Huxley (1907-1997), author of several novels (The Flame Trees of Thika), memoirs and travel pieces, is lively and well researched. Leaving Huxley in England, her parents moved to Kenya in 1912, where, as members of Britain's white settler community, they struggled to run a coffee plantation. Huxley was sent for the next year, and she spent her childhood and adolescence hunting, playing polo, going on safaris and participating in other such colonial activities. Huxley left Africa in 1925 to attend college in England and the U.S., but returned periodically to visit her parents and do research. Nicholls plumbs Huxley's personal and published papers for detail, creating skillful illustrations of character and setting. Describing an elderly Huxley, she writes: "Without vanity, she wore clothes of muted colours, often tweeds, and liked brown jerseys. She usually wore trousers rather then dresses and her hair, for which she cared little, was cut short in a pudding-basin shape." Still, when it comes to considering Huxley's work in a larger, social context, Nicholls is both an apologist and a rationalist. She glosses over thorny issues of race and colonialism, concluding that while Huxley has been criticized for her lack of social awareness, she should be congratulated for her honesty and ability to change her views with the times: "she knew that the Empire would soon be destroyed by those it was supposed to be helping, and by a British government that found it an expensive anachronism in a new liberal age." In the end, this is a solid exploration of a deserving and challenging subject. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A sturdy biography of the Anglo-Kenyan novelist and essayist, the first such work devoted to her. "Elspeth Huxley [1907-97] is best known for her writings on Africa," writes English literary scholar Nicholls. "Yet as a young woman she was excessively impatient to get away from her parents’ farm there." That impatience took Huxley (née Grant) to England, where she forged a long career as a writer of many kinds of prose, from radio scripts to lengthy memoirs. Only one of her books, The Flame Trees of Thika, published in 1959, was particularly well known in its time or is remembered today; Nicholls gives it, as well as Huxley’s other work, careful consideration, showing which parts accurately reflect Huxley’s childhood in Kenya and which are the products of pure invention. ("The book," she concludes, "is a work of fiction, though many incidents are based on actual events." Librarians and booksellers may thus want to reshelve it.) Huxley was intensely aware of her status as an overlooked writer, Nicholls remarks, though not particularly aggrieved by it. Some of her lack of fame she attributed to a dislike for the swirl of self-promotion ("I am a very bad public speaker and detest it, and hopeless on committees"), some to being dismissed by the literary establishment as a colonial, some to having spoken and written in qualified defense of white colonialism in Africa. Nicholls gives a good account of Huxley’s life and work, placing her in the milieu of the British East Africa of WWI and the England of WWII and beyond, charting Huxley’s course from ambitious youth to parsimonious, somewhat dotty old age. All the while, from decade to decade, as Nicholls capably documents, Huxley remained activeand productive, championed by the likes of T.S. Eliot even as her readership dwindled and assignments came fewer. A worthwhile glimpse into European colonialism and its literary chroniclers.