Profile of Elspeth Huxley on Famous Like Me

Elspeth Jouceline Huxley (July 23, 1907 - January 10, 1997) - a woman of compelling personality and energy - was a polymath. She was, at various points in her life, a writer, a journalist, a broadcaster, a colonial officer, an environmentalist and government advisor. She is best known for her lyrical books The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard based on her experiences growing up in a coffee farm in Colonial Kenya.

Elspeth Huxley's parents arrived 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 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 resisgned 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. 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.

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