The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

They had one son, Charles, who was born in February 1944. She married Gervas Huxley, the son of doctor Henry Huxley (1865–1946) in 1931. Huxley wrote the foreword to Joy's autobiography The Searching Spirit.

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. In the 1960s, she served as a correspondent for the National Review magazine. Although she was initially an advocate of continued colonial rule, she later called for the independence of African nations. 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 (the Monckton Commission). ĭuring the Second World War, Huxley was a broadcaster for the BBC. Her final tally of 42 books included the ten works of fiction and 29 non-fiction books, as well as thousands of pamphlets and articles. 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. Huxley refused, and the book was published by Chatto & Windus. 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's 1939 book Red Strangers describes life among the Kikuyu of Kenya around the time of the arrival of the first European settlers. 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. She resigned her post in 1932 and travelled widely. Huxley was appointed Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929. 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 was educated at a whites-only school in Nairobi. It was adapted into a television miniseries in 1981. Huxley's 1959 book The Flame Trees of Thika explores how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were. Her upbringing was unconventional she was 'almost treated as a parcel, being passed from hand to hand'. Elspeth, aged six, arrived in December 1913, complete with governess and maid. 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.

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley