I've very excited about this week's library find as I've started reading and am quite enjoying it. I'm not sure what I was looking for now but I was in the PR6015s and came across Elspeth Huxley's books. She of the The Flame Trees of Thika fame (and I am told on good authority the BBC adaptation is also excellent). Did you know she was actually quite a prolific writer? She wrote thirty books including a number of novels, biographies and even a few crime novels as well as several volumes of memoirs. The Flame Trees of Thika is the first volume, followed by On the Edge of the Rift and concluding with Love Among the Daughters: Memories of the Twenties in England and America. It's this latter book that caught my eye (my library has ten of her books but only this and The Flame Trees of Thika from her memoirs).
She was born in England but moved with her parents to colonial Kenya in 1912 when she was five where the family ran a coffee plantation. Although published in 1968 Love Among the Daughters is about her return "home" (as England was always called) in 1925 when she lived with her aunt and uncle and cousins and attended Reading University. She also attended Cornell in New York where she received a degree in Agriculture. From what little I've read of Love Among the Daughters, Huxley has an amusing, easy-going writing style that I find very engaging. Also it is interesting to get a peek into this now vanished world of England and America in the Twenties. The New York Times reviewed the book very favorably.
"With the clarity of thought of a witty and brilliant mind scientifically trained, Elspeth Huxley expresses herself in scalpel-precise language. Whether she is detailing the past and present of friends relations, describing the death of a fox or Prohibition picnic orgies, she is funny, bawdy, serious, nostalgic and always entertaining."
For a little taste of her prose style here is how she describes her three cousins.
Gertrude, the eldest:
"Gertrude had always been my anunt's least favoured daughter. Either because of that, or the other way round, she was Uncle Jack's favourite; She was also the prettiest, in fact more or less a beauty, with wonderfully deep eyes, a perfect skin and clear-cut, well-proportioned features. Also she was slim, and had a fashionably straight figure."
Kate, the middle daughter:
"Although Kate was often cheeky, disobedient and infuriating, my aunt liked her the best, and Uncle Jack the least, of their daughters."
"I thought she was at school."
"She has been expelled."
"As my aunt did not sound really angry, and might even have been faintly amused, I ventured to ask why."
"Insubordination, going out at night and gambling on race horses."
"Gambling on race horses isn't exactly a crime."
"It is in a convent. Especially when you start a book and persuade the others to gamble and don't pay out the proper odds on winners."
And Joanna, the youngest:
"I inquired after Joanna. 'At school in suffolk,' Aunt Madge said. 'One of those so-called smart places where they learn nothing except how to paint their faces, fall in love with the games mistress and don't get enough to eat. They wear hideous pleated things called gym tunics that show their knock-knees. Joanna says she has chilblains all the year round and plays scales on a broken-down piano for an hour every day. It was Kitty who insisted on her going there so Kitty must take the consequences."
I've already decided I'm going to have to backtrack when I finish this and read her other memoirs, too. Until then, perhaps I'll share more of this as I read?