Elspeth huxley biography summary example

Turner was due to spend the next year in Trinidad as training for the Colonial Service and is identified by Keefe as George R. Parker, a Wantage Hall student One, Professor Sidney Pennington, is even mentioned by his real name — there was no need for a pseudonym because she held him in high regard — he was a practical person who could turn his hand to real farm work.

This should not surprise us as, before his promotion, the College had appointed him farm manager in Neville, professor of Agricultural Chemistry and Dean of Agriculture since He is not named in the book, presumably because his description is less complimentary:. She would often transfer a remembered incident to a different time, and always amalgamated or distorted characters so that there was no danger of libel.

Nevertheless, as Antonia Fraser suggested in the Sunday Times 22nd September , Huxley skilfully negotiated the blending of fact and fiction such that the reader understood far more of the social history of the period than through academic study. All rights reserved. Childs, W. Making a university: an account of the university movement at Reading.

London: J. Holt, J. The University of Reading: the first fifty years. Reading: University of Reading Press. Keefe, R. Morley, E. Before and after: reminiscences of a working life original text of edited by Barbara Morris.

Elspeth huxley biography summary example

Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. On her return to the boat, she met Burkitt and rubbed in the fact that she had suffered no ill effects.

Huxley "never wore a sunhat in Africa again. Elspeth Huxley's entire life was punctuated by breaks with convention. Like the wild animals of Africa, with whom she spent a good portion of her childhood, she was restless, energetic, and peripatetic. This is not surprising considering the family Huxley was born into in London in Her mother Nellie Grosvenor Grant and father Josceline Grant, though both members of the aristocracy, did not live the stodgy, manorial life that has come to be associated with the English elite.

Josceline was a wandering adventurer. He had served with The Royal Scots in the Boer War in South Africa and had lost much of his inherited fortune in investments in a diamond mine in Portuguese East Africa now Mozambique and in developing a car he and a partner had invented. Josceline loved cars and had participated in the Paris to Madrid race where his chain-driven Mercedes overturned.

Huxley's mother Nellie was also an adventuring entrepreneur who went into business with Trudie Denman , buying, training and selling ponies. They broke the wild ponies by strapping a children's pony pannier to the pony's back and placing a child on top. At three years old, Huxley became the chosen guinea pig. In a letter, Nellie describes the pony and Huxley tromping about the training ground: "The pair careered round and round, Elspeth chuckling with delight and poor Nanny Newport rushing and screaming round the perimeter.

Whether [Huxley] is detailing the past and present of friends and relations, describing the death of a fox or Prohibition picnic orgies, she is funny, bawdy, serious, nostalgic and always entertaining. When Huxley was five, her parents decided to try their luck in an exciting "new" country that was then the talk of London. British East Africa now Kenya had recently been opened up by an "adventurous" railway line.

Big game hunting in the interior had already become legendary, and hunters returned to England with stories of wide-open terrain still in pristine condition. The high altitude of much of the territory produced a climate inviting to northern Europeans. Huxley did not join her parents in Africa for nearly a year. Having stayed behind in England with relatives, she was not to follow until her parents were somewhat established on the acres they had bought 30 miles north of Nairobi near a town later called Thika.

Huxley would have none of this forced separation. At age five, she escaped from her nursery at night and set out for Africa with her seven-year-old cousin, Puk. The two collected the bread, butter and cake that Huxley had been saving in a tin beneath the roots of a yew tree, then bedded down for the night in a woods several fields away. A constable discovered them and carried Huxley under his arm back to the nursery.

Huxley's most famous book, The Flame Trees of Thika, written in and later turned into a seven-part "Masterpiece Theater" production airing in , is a semi-autobiographical account of her early years in Africa. In , the beginning of the Great War put an end to the blissful days in Kenya. Huxley's father joined the King's African Rifles and fought the Germans on several occasions along the border between Kenya and Tanganyika now Tanzania.

In December of that year, he left for England to rejoin his regiment, the Royal Scots. He was wounded in the Battle of Ypres in Belgium in November A month later, Elspeth and her mother left for England despite the risk of their boat being torpedoed by German submarines. Nellie spent her considerable energy running the Women's Land Army in Wessex while Elspeth was sent off to a girl's boarding school at Aldeburgh in Suffolk.

After the freedom and warm climate of Africa, a winter in a boarding school on the coast of East Anglia , when war shortages made heating sources scarce, was like a prison sentence in Siberia. Huxley recalled times when food shortages made her so hungry she ate her toothpaste. During the war, the students watched a Zeppelin crash and burn near Felixstowe.

A day or two later, when the school children visited the wreckage, some picked up pieces of the Zeppelin and later made them into brooches. Occasionally during the war, a girl would leave school in tears, having been told of the death of a brother or father. They would return after their brief mourning period and no mention of the loss was ever raised.

In , her parents having already returned to Kenya, Huxley was still interned in Aldeburgh boarding school. London: HarperCollins, Times Higher Education. African Studies Companion Online. Retrieved 1 February Retrieved 22 March Bibliography [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Authority control databases. Categories : births deaths Kenyan women writers Cornell University alumni Alumni of the University of Reading Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Huxley family 20th-century Kenyan women writers 20th-century Kenyan writers English women biographers English women mystery writers British Kenya people Kenyan women novelists Kenyan novelists 20th-century novelists 20th-century English biographers.

Toggle the table of contents. Elspeth Huxley. Elspeth Grant 23 July London [ 1 ]. Author, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government adviser. Reading University , Cornell University.