Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE was an English writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government adviser.
13 Facts About Elspeth Huxley
1.
2.
Elspeth Huxley 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.
3.
Elspeth Huxley's husband, Gervas Huxley, was a grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley.
4.
Elspeth Huxley's upbringing was unconventional; she was "almost treated as a parcel, being passed from hand to hand".
5.
Elspeth Huxley left Africa in 1925, earning a degree in agriculture at Reading University in England and studying at Cornell University in upstate New York.
6.
Elspeth Huxley was appointed Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929.
7.
Elspeth Huxley resigned her post in 1932 and travelled widely.
8.
Elspeth 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.
9.
In 1960, Elspeth Huxley was appointed an independent member of the Advisory Commission for the Review of the Constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
10.
Elspeth 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.
11.
Elspeth Huxley wrote the foreword to Joy's autobiography The Searching Spirit.
12.
Elspeth Huxley married Gervas Huxley, the son of doctor Henry Huxley in 1931.
13.
Elspeth Huxley died on 10 January 1997 aged 89, in a nursing home at Tetbury in Gloucestershire, England.