Elspeth huxley biography summary example

It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! There are no reviews yet. She married Gervas Huxley, the son of doctor Henry Huxley — in Huxley died on 10 January aged 89, in a nursing home at Tetbury in Gloucestershire, England.

A collection of twelve boxes of photographs, prints, negatives, contact prints and slides is held at Bristol Archives in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection. Most of the photographs were taken by Huxley, with the rest collected by her. The collection covers Huxley's whole career and subject matter includes Kenyan safari landscapes and local people specifically the Kikuyu peoplethe Mau Mau uprisingwhite settlers, Edwardian Mombasaand a transcript of an oral history interview taken by the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum Ref.

Christine S. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikiquote Wikidata item. English writer, journalist, magistrate, environmentalist and adviser. 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 inis a semi-autobiographical account of her early years in Africa. Inthe 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 Angliawhen war shortages made heating sources scarce, was like a elspeth huxley biography summary example 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. Inher parents having already returned to Kenya, Huxley was still interned in Aldeburgh boarding school. Again she was determined to escape to Africa; by now, however, she was old enough to realize she could not do it on her own, so she resolved to make such a nuisance of herself at school that they would be glad to be rid of her.

Already interested in horse racingshe set up a book of bets on the Derby. When the authorities found out she was collecting pennies from classmates, she was deemed a source of contamination to the other students and isolated in the sanatorium. Her parents brought Huxley back to Thika rather than find another boarding school. Huxley had won.

Elspeth huxley biography summary example

In Africa, the coffee plantation the Grants had developed from wild bush was running full gear. Huxley continued her education with lessons from her mother and father and any neighbors who could help. She spent much of her free time hunting in the bush with her. Inshe collaborated with photographer Hugo van Lawick, ex-husband of Jane Goodallon the book The Last Days in Eden, which records the wildlife of the Serengeti.

InNellie Grant's lifelong friend, Trudie Denman, bought the family a 1,acre farm near Njoro in the breathtakingly beautiful Rift Valley, miles northeast of Nairobi. Elspeth's father would die in a hospital near this farm 25 years later in Her mother would live on the farm for 43 years, struggling constantly to make it profitable.

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. Reading: Two Rivers Press. University of Reading Special Collections. All rights reserved]. Elspeth Huxley, born Elspeth Grant inwas an agriculture student at Reading in the s.

She was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, travel-writer, journalist, broadcaster, agriculturist and environmentalist. She was esteemed as an expert on African affairs and was invited onto the Monckton Commission which reviewed the constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in She arrived during the period when the University College was being transformed into the University of Reading but, as far as I can tell, she made no mention of this in her writing or later interviews.

In an interview for the Bristol Museum innearly 70 years later, the period at Reading was dismissed with no more than a cursory mention:. It is interspersed with witty descriptions of her eccentric relatives and their acquaintances. Huxley, newly arrived from the colonies, is the naive outsider, like an anthropologist observing the customs of a remote tribe, delicately negotiating English society with its house parties, fox hunting and intimidating servants.

An interesting feature is her perspective on the relative merits of university life in England and the USA.