Huxley, Elspeth Josceline Grant

▪ 1998

      British writer (b. July 23, 1907, London, Eng.—d. Jan. 10, 1997, Tetbury, Gloucestershire, Eng.), was the versatile, prolific author of more than 30 books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Her wit and sharp insights were evident in works that included biographies, crime novels, memoirs, and travel books. When Huxley was five, her family moved to Kenya, and Africa figured largely in most of her writings. Her best-known work, the autobiographical novel The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), was based on her early years in Kenya. It was a best-seller and was adapted for television in the early 1980s. Much of Huxley's early schooling was done at home, though during World War I she attended boarding school in England. When she was 14, an East African newspaper published an article of hers on polo and made her its polo correspondent. By the age of 17 she had had 65 articles published and had illustrated some of them with her own photographs. Huxley earned (1927) a degree in agriculture from the University of Reading, Eng., and attended (1928-29) Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. She then became an assistant press officer for the Empire Marketing Board in London. It was there that she met Gervas Huxley, and in 1931 they were married. He was appointed head of the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, and they traveled around the world for five years as he encouraged the drinking of tea. Huxley established her reputation with her first book, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya (1935), and other works soon followed, among them Murder at Government House (1937), Murder on Safari (1938), and Red Strangers (1939). Huxley returned to England with her husband during World War II and worked for the BBC's propaganda office and then as a liaison between the BBC and the Colonial Office. She served from 1952 to 1959 on the BBC's General Advisory Council and from 1959 to 1960 on the Moncton Advisory Commission on Central Africa. Huxley was appointed C.B.E. in 1962. Among her later books were three other autobiographical novels—On the Edge of the Rift (1962), Love Among the Daughters (1968), Out in the Midday Sun (1985)—and a collection of excerpts from her mother's letters prefaced by a memoir, Nellie: Letters from Africa (1980).

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