Elspeth Huxley

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Elspeth Joscelin Huxley (née Grant) (July 23, 1907 - January 10, 1997) was a polymath, writer, journalist, broadcaster, colonial officer, environmentalist and government advisor. She is best known for her lyrical books The Flame Trees of Thika (later adapted for television by ITV) and The Mottled Lizard based on her experiences growing up in a coffee farm in Colonial Kenya. She was also Aldous Huxley's sister-in-law.

Elspeth Huxley's parents arrived in Thika in what was then British East Africa in 1912 to start a life as coffee farmers and colonial settlers. Flame Trees... explores how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were.

She then left Africa in 1925 for further studies in England and the United States of America but returned periodically. She became the Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929. She married Gervas Huxley, the son of the doctor Henry Huxley (1865-1946) and grandson of Thomas Huxley, in 1931. They had one son. She resigned her post in 1932 and traveled widely. During this period she published her first works including Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya - a biography of the famous settler. In 1948 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice - A Journey through Africa' was published. She was appointed an independent member of the Advisory Commission for the Review of the Constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia (the Monckton Commission). An advocate of colonialism early in life, she later called for independence for African countries. In the 1960s, she served as a correspondent for the National Review magazine.

Huxley's Red Strangers was republished by Penguin Books in 1999 and by Penguin Classics in 2000; Richard Dawkins played an important role in getting the book to be republished, and he wrote a preface to the new edition. However, as of 2006, Red Strangers was once again out of print. This work, considered by many to be her finest, describes with great imaginative skill and anthropological detail life among the Kikuyu of Kenya before the arrival of Europeans and afterwards.