Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE was a polymath, writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government advisor. She wrote 30 books; but she is best known for her lyrical books The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard which were based on her experiences growing up in a coffee farm in Colonial Kenya. Her husband, Gervas Huxley, was a grandson of Thomas Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley. Nellie and Major Josceline Grant, Elspeth Grant's parents, arrived in Thika in what was then British East Africa in 1912, when she was 5 years old, to start a life as coffee... farmers and colonial settlers. Flame Trees explores how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were. Elspeth was educated at a whites only school in Nairobi. She left Africa in 1925, earning a degree in agriculture at Reading University in England and studying at Cornell University in upstate New York. Elspeth returned to Africa periodically, becoming the Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929. She married Gervas Huxley, the son of the doctor Henry Huxley in 1931.
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| Birthdate: | July 23, 1907 |
| Date of death: | January 10, 1997 |
| Education: | Cornell University |
| Also known as: | Elspeth Joscelin Grant Huxley |