Elspeth Huxley

-
Standard Name: Huxley, Elspeth
Birth Name: Elspeth Josceline Grant
Pseudonym: Bamboo
Pseudonym: L. S.
Married Name: Elspeth Josceline Huxley
Most of EH 's writing reflects on her experiences growing up in Kenya and her continued interest in African development. Her output includes both novels and non-fiction: autobiography, travel writing, political exposition, biography, and journalism, produced throughout the latter half of the twentieth century—her book-publishing career alone spanned more than sixty years. Sympathising from the beginning with the white settlers and increasingly with the black Africans, with a professional background in agriculture as well as journalism, she became a skilled interpreter of Africa to the world outside, even while remembering that no person of one race and culture can truly interpret events from the angle of individuals who belong to a different race and culture.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
557
This has not exempted her from later strong critique of her racial attitudes: attitudes which were normal, nearly inescapable, for her generation, her race, and her colonial identity.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Isak Dinesen
At the time of her separation from her husband, Karen Blixen was already a personage famous or notorious among the other white settlers. Nellie Grant (mother of the writer Elspeth Huxley ), who was farming...
Health Isak Dinesen
White neighbours in Kenya discussed whether her syphilis had come from her husband (although, as Elspeth Huxley observed, he remained the picture of health himself, and did not pass on any sexually transmitted disease to...
Health Aldous Huxley
In Kansas in 1960, AH underwent surgery to remove a pre-cancerous lesion from his mouth, but it failed to stop the development of cancer of the tongue. He declined further surgery, not wanting to lose...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Taylor detailed the interest that attended this book's appearance. Published on a Monday, it was broadcast as a radio play on Wednesday, discussed on radio on Thursday by Daniel George (who called the author...
Literary responses Bessie Head
Ronald Blythe wrote in a foreword to the eventual publication: Rarely has the cadence and the intelligence of the four generations which lived through these years been caught to accurately or so movingly.Elspeth Huxley
Occupation Elizabeth Jane Howard
In winter 1953 EJH , aged about thirty, became an editor at Chatto and Windus , which was then run by Norah Smallwood and Ian Parsons . She read submitted manuscripts, wrote reports on them...
Publishing Isak Dinesen
She wrote it first in English and translated it herself into Danish. Starting as notes taken at Mbogani House in Kenya, it was continued at Rungstedlund and finished at Skagen. Begun as a...
Reception Isak Dinesen
Nevertheless, today's intense interest in her, and the various aspects of her appeal, are both reflected in recent publications. During 2003 she was discussed under the rubrics of White Women Writers and their African Invention...

Timeline

December 1912
The population of British East Africa (making up, during the continued existence of German East Africa, the later Zanzibar, Kenya, and Uganda) stood at 2,758,088 Africans, 3,175 whites, and 11,886 Indians.