Elspeth Huxley: A Biography - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002

Elspeth Huxley: A Biography. C. S. Nicholls. HarperCollins. [pounds sterling]20.00. 482 pages. ISBN 0-00-257165-X. Elspeth Huxley was famous to generations of Britons as a writer and broadcaster whose speciality was African affairs and, in particular, the colony of Kenya. Her defence of colonial settlers, if not of colonialism, earned her many enemies among the intelligentsia of the Left.

In her life she embodied the transposition from the colonial empire to the self-governing states of modem Africa. She wrote some forty-two books including many unrelated to Africa. The author, who herself grew up in East Africa, is familiar with many of the areas which concerned Huxley. Because she had access to family letters she has been able to describe not just her subject's life but the change in her attitudes to Africa and especially, Kenya. At one time she believed it possible for the two races to work together (unpleasant hearing to the politically correct) but she later changed her mind and concluded that the remain ing British had better leave Kenya. Her dreams of cooperation had vanished in the reality of post-colonial native regimes. Throughout her career, as her biographer writes, 'she was honest, though never brutally so; wise, but not obtrusively, and she made complex issues easy to understand'. This is a sympathetic biography about a woman whose life embodies an important strand in twentieth century British (and African) history.