Elspeth Huxley NELLIE First Edition Signed
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Elspeth Huxley NELLIE First Edition Signed
First edition, first print hardback of NELLIE Letters from Africa - with a memoir by Elspeth Huxley and published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, in 1980. Signed and dated by Huxley on the title page.The book is in very good condition (clean green cloth boards and bright gold lettering on spine) with some minor wear to the dust jacket, which is not price clipped (light creasing to edges, slight tanning inside the jacket, slight foxing to the jacket flaps). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears. There is a previous owner's gift inscription on the front endpaper.
Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE (n?e Grant; 1907 1997) was a polymath, writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government advisor. She wrote 30 books; including memoirs, biographies, crime stories and novels, many inspired by her childhood in colonial Kenya. 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. When her autobiographical fiction The Flame Trees of Thika was published in 1959, it became an immensely popular best seller, and in 1981 was made into a television series in Britain.
"Mother's aren't good subjects for biographies unless like Queen Victoria or Cleopatra,' This was Nellie Grant's view of the 'deplorable habit' of writing about one's mother. Her daughter, Elspeth Huxley, author of The Flame Trees of Thika had a great affection for Nellie and in a delightful memoir, with a selection of letters, she paints an intimate portrait of a courageous, amusing and observant individual whose zest for life withstood many batterings.
The correspondence, spanning more than forty years, provides an intriguing record of the life-style of an unconventional white settler in bygone days.
With her husband Jos, Nellie emigrated in 1912 in the heyday of the British Empre, then assumed to be if not eternal, very nearly so. In the fifties she witnessed the terrifying events of the Mau Mau revolt, and in the sixties, the emergence of the New Africa. That once remote colony, the haunt of rugged pioneers, primitive tribes, missionaries and big game, had become the thriving independent Republic of Kenya. At the age of eighty, Nellie retired to Portugal where once again she set about the business of becoming self-sufficient."
326 pages. Illustrated 8 pages of black & white photographs.
ISBN: 0 297 77706 8
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Elspeth Huxley NELLIE First Edition Signed