Elspeth huxley biography template

For those of you who know me, I’m not one to play the gender card (except when I’m pleading ignorance on military hardware and hierarchy issues). But being one to promote the minority voice (of all kinds), I couldn’t help but notice the lack of female novelists writing about the campaign in East Africa during World War 1.

Talking of minority voices, there are no authors of colour who have written on the campaign and even more surprising, the campaign in East Africa seems to be the only one in Africa written about – I am yet to find a novel mentioning German South West Africa (other than Francis Brett Young’s Jim Redlake which covers East Africa too), Cameroon, Togo or Belgian Congo. Egypt features but in connection with the wider war in Europe, Gallipoli and the war on the sea.

I came across Maya Alexandri’s The Celebration Husband about three years ago when it was in draft form and I was writing an academic paper on Fictional Accounts of the East Africa campaign. For some reason, the editors didn’t like my original title of A Novel East Africa campaign (watch this space…). But it was only earlier this year that I managed to track a copy down and had the privilege of reading before it was published.

I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and was pleasantly surprised that the changed details didn’t result in the same reaction I had when I read my first ever novel of the campaign – Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil. I won’t go into the reasons for my outburst, save to say I have not been the only one to have issues with Smith’s book. Maya has changed the order of battles around and although some characters are named and others purposefully identifiable, the situations and personalities described are such that they hold together for a good read.

I’d like to think I’ve also matured a bit in terms of seeing how historians and historical noveli

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

There’s surprisingly little about Elspeth Huxley on the internet. Book reviews, the odd quote shared on Twitter, scholarly papers wrestling with her writings on colonialism. But search hard enough and a gem awaits in the BBC Archive. The prolific author and adventurer’s Radio 4 Desert Island Discs interview was recorded in 1981, a time when colonial nostalgia was running high and The Flame Trees of Thika, a TV drama series based on her acclaimed 1959 memoir depicting her childhood in East Africa, had debuted on the BBC to rave reviews.

Huxley was then in her 70s and sounds like she’s enjoying her moment in the spotlight with host Roy Plomey. She kicks off her musical selections with Cole Porter’s jaunty 1930s anthem, “Anything Goes”, whose wry, gossipy lyrics and rebellious spirit she identified with. She reveals that her expulsion, aged thirteen, from the strict Suffolk boarding school where she was sequestered during World War 1, was due to her interest in horse racing-and betting – she’d set up a book on that year’s Derby. “I did make rather a lot of money,” she recalls. “This wasn’t thought well of in a girls’ boarding school in those days… but anything goes!”

As a schoolgirl, Huxley was desperate to return to the relative freedom of Africa. She’d first arrived there aged six, a year after her parents – stoic, quick-witted Nellie and dreamy, impecunious Jos – bought a plot of land from an ex-Etonian crony. Her unconventional childhood saw her living in a grass hut, running wild with the animals, enduring her parents’ marital strains and never receiving a formal education – but it freed her from the strictures of the aristocratic society she was born into. When the war brought her family briefly back to Britain, she found it cold and austere. So she was overjoyed when the school authorities dispatched her back in disgrace to her parents’ coffee plantation.

Within five years, however, Huxley was desperate to escape what, aged eighteen, sh

Praise for The Flame Trees Of Thika