Elspeth huxley biography summary examples

‘It seemed to rain a great deal in Reading.’ (Elspeth Huxley, ‘Love among the Daughters’, p. 58)

Elspeth Huxley, born Elspeth Grant in 1907, was an agriculture student at Reading in the 1920s. Earlier posts on this blog have mentioned her ‘approved lodgings’ and her description of the Great Hall as ‘a sort of outsize garden shed’.

There are so many facets to Huxley’s life that it is hard to sum her up. She was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, travel-writer, journalist, broadcaster, agriculturist and environmentalist. She was esteemed as an expert on African affairs and was invited onto the Monckton Commission which reviewed the constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1960.

In 1925 at the age of 18 she left her parents’ coffee plantation in Kenya and headed for England to begin two years as a student of Agriculture at Reading. She arrived during the period when the University College was being transformed into the University of Reading but, as far as I can tell, she made no mention of this in her writing or later interviews.

The University’s official record of her is sparse but there are two relevant entries in the University’s annual report for 1926-27: she was awarded the Diploma in Agriculture, Division I (‘Subject to completion of farm work’) and was the recipient of the Leonard Sutton Prize for Agriculture.

In an interview for the Bristol Museum in 1994, nearly 70 years later, the period at Reading was dismissed with no more than a cursory mention:

‘I left [Kenya] when I was 18 to get a bit of education as they thought, because I hadn’t had any to note.’ 

Nevertheless, it was a sufficiently important landmark in her life that she devoted six chapters to it in her autobiographical narrative ‘Love among the Daughters’.

‘Love among the Daughters’

This was Huxley’s 26th book.

Prolific English writer of nonfiction and fiction who is especially noted for her widely acclaimed books about her experiences in, and the history of, East Africa during the 20th century. Born Elspeth Josceline Grant on July 23, 1907, in London, England; died in Tetbury, England, in January 1997; daughter of Josceline Grant (an army major and farmer) and Eleanor Lillian (Grosvenor) Grant; attended Reading University, Diploma in Agriculture, 1927; attended Cornell University, 1927–28; married Gervas Huxley (a tea commissioner and writer), on December 12, 1931 (died 1971); children: Charles Grant Huxley (b. February 1944).

Parents moved to Kenya (1912); joined them (1913); returned to England (1915), sent away to boarding school at Aldeburgh in Suffolk; returned to Kenya (1919); attended Reading University, England (1925–27); studied at Cornell University (1928); worked as assistant press officer for Empire Marketing board, London, England (1929–32); author (1935–97); worked for British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), London, England, in new department (1941–43), member of general advisory council (1952–59), broadcaster of BBC's "The Critics" program, and on African matters; became a justice of the peace for Wiltshire (1946–77); awarded Commander, Order of the British Empire (1960); served as member, Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa (1959–60).

Selected publications:

White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya (1935); Murder on Safari (1938); Red Strangers (1939); Atlantic Ordeal: The Story of Mary Cornish (1942); English Women (1942); Settlers of Kenya (1948); The Sorcerer's Apprentice: A Journey through East Africa (1948); The Walled City (1949); Four Guineas: A Journey through West Africa (1954); The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (1959); On the Edge of the Rift: Memories of Kenya (1962); Love Among the Daughters: Memories of the Twenties in England and Ame

English writer, journalist, magistrate, environmentalist and adviser

Elspeth Joscelin HuxleyCBE (née Grant; 23 July 1907 – 10 January 1997) was an English writer, 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 Henry Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley.

Early life and education

See also: Huxley family

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 in colonial Kenya. 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 miniseries 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. She returned to Africa periodically.

Caree

Anne Wetherilt, PhD student, English

In November 2020, a one-day online conference brought together scholars, journalists and readers to celebrate the centenary of the feminist magazine Time and Tide.  Speakers highlighted the magazine’s progressive interwar agenda, and the contributions of well-known writers such as Rebecca West, Winifred Holtby, E. M. Delafield and Cicely Hamilton.  Although the magazine had no overt party-political affiliation, it engaged with topical issues, including women’s political rights, their role in the workplace and their cultural interests.  In the late 1920s, it also embraced an internationalist agenda, committed to peace and disarmament.

However by the late 1930s Time and Tide had evolved from a feminist magazine, aimed primarily at educated middle-class women and their political and cultural interests, to a general interest periodical with an increasingly male and conservative readership.  After World War Two, the magazine moved further to the right and women no longer played a key role. Its post-war coverage has attracted limited scholarly interest.

I first became interested in Time and Tide’s post-war history as I was researching the late colonial fiction of Elspeth Huxley.  Best known for her fictional autobiographies The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962), which depict an idyllic Kenyan childhood in the early decades of the twentieth century, Huxley was a frequent contributor to Time and Tide in the 1950s and 1960s, commenting on political developments in Britain’s overseas colonies. Although she came to accept African independence, Huxley was the voice of a conservative readership, consistently arguing against an accelerated timetable for decolonisation and expressing concerns about the future of African nations, governed by, in her view, ill-prepared indigenous politicians.

Widely recognised as an expert on African matters and praised for her lyrica