Sometimes a book comes along that is not only enjoyable and utterly delightful but leaves you perplexed as to why it ever went out of print. Elspeth Huxley's Love Among the Daughters: Memories of the Twenties in England and America is just such a book. This is a hidden gem of a memoir and is a book ripe for the picking by one of the many small presses out there who is working to bring back into print undeservedly forgotten books. I can totally see this in a lovely dove grey wrapper with a suitable end paper and accompanying bookmark for example. Happily for me it was in my library's stacks and there are still used copies floating around for those who don't mind searching around for a copy.
Elspeth Huxley is probably best known for her memoir of her childhood spent in Colonial Kenya, The Flame Trees of Thika, but she also wrote more than thirty other books, some of which are novels as well as a few nonfiction works and I do hope there might be a few more memoirs mixed in as well. My library has a small selection of her books and I will most certainly be browsing the offerings and bringing home a few this week. Love Among the Daughters was the last book I read in 2011 and had I finished it sooner would most certainly have added it to my favorites list. Although it's been a while since I've read anything by the Mitford sisters, it reminded me a tad of Nancy Mitford's style or at least that same milieu.
Although Huxley was born in England and considered it her home, she grew up in Kenya and only returned to England as a young woman after WWI. Love Among the Daughters is about her time spent living with her mother's sister's family in the mid-1920s. She went to Reading University and spent a year in New York where she attended Cornell, and it is with a acerbically witty eye she writes about her experiences as a 'foreigner'/Colonial in these places. She's wise and funny and her writing style is sharp and humorous. If you're curious about life at this time you could do worse than pick up this book as you certainly get a flavor for the period as told by someone who lived it.
Since this is a memoir spanning just a few years she picks and chooses the experiences she writes about. She doesn't really write about her youth in Africa or her immediate family, but she does write about her extended family in Britain. This was one of my lost in the stacks books and I shared a few excerpts about her cousins last fall. They are a quirky family and she writes about them with fondness and lightness as well about the family home, Nathan's Orchard. The family seems upper middle class, wealthy enough to have at least one servant and well connected to allow visits to country houses complete with parties and hunting.
She went to study agriculture at Reading University and then later an uncle sold a horse so she could travel to America to continue her studies. For Americans of this period France was all the rage, but for Europeans, apparently America was the popular destination. It's interesting to read about the cultural differences between the two places, particularly so since Huxley was sort of twice-removed. British, but raised outside Britain she is an astute observer of society and while she doesn't shy away from writing about cultural foibles she can also be generous and lavish in her praise.
I enjoy memoirs, maybe even a little more than straightforward fact-filled biographies (though I like those too) as there is always a slant towards the personal. There is lots of history here--life for a woman in the 1920s at both home and university, the General Strike of 1926 in England, Prohibition and student life in America, as well as a look at a vanished way of life--wealth and opportunity when the world seemed at one's fingertips just before the Great Depression. But everything about the period is filtered through this one woman's own perception. It's filled with interesting information but it reads almost like a novel as she re-imagines situations and conversations, and as it was written, or at least published in 1968, it's a backwards-looking and more informed view she writes from.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and now I think I will likely go back a bit further in time to read about her childhood in Kenya.