Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE (née Grant; 23 July 1907 – 10 January 1997) was an English writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government adviser. She wrote over 40 books, including her best-known lyrical books, The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard, based on her youth in a coffee farm in British Kenya. Her husband, Gervas Huxley, was a grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley. Early life and education Nellie and Major Josceline Grant, Elspeth's parents, arrived in Thika in what was then British East Africa in 1912, to start a life as coffee farmers in colonial Kenya. Elspeth, aged six, arrived in December 1913, complete with governess and maid. Her upbringing was unconventional; she was "almost treated as a parcel, being passed from hand to hand". Huxley's 1959 book The Flame Trees of Thika explores how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were. It was adapted into a television miniseries in 1981. 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. She returned to Africa periodically. Career Huxley was appointed Assistant Press Officer to the Empire Marketing Board in 1929. She resigned her post in 1932 and travelled widely. Huxley started writing soon after her marriage; her first book, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya about the famous white settler, was published in 1935. Huxley's 1939 book Red Strangers describes life among the Kikuyu of Kenya around the time of the arrival of the first European settlers. The manuscript was sent first to the publisher Macmillan, but Harold Macmillan, then working for the family firm, agreed to publish it only with considerable cuts, including a graphic description of female circumcision. Huxley refused, and the book was published by Chatto & Windus. Huxley remembered: "It was indeed a happy day for me when our future Prime Minister couldn't take clitoridectomy." The book was republished by Penguin Books in 1999 and again by Penguin Classics in 2000; Richard Dawkins played an important role in getting the book republished, and wrote a preface to the new edition. Her final tally of 42 books included the ten works of fiction and 29 non-fiction books, as well as thousands of pamphlets and articles. During the Second