Nellie’s Story: With A Memoir By Her Daughter Elspeth Huxley.

GRANT, Nellie and Elspeth Huxley.

Item Number: 95377

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1981.

First American edition of Nellie Grant’s autobiography, with a memoir by her daughter Elspeth Huxley. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by Elspeth Huxley on he half-title page, “For Joe Ferrier – The favourite of my books because most of it was written by someone else, my mother, the greatest character I have known – Elspeth Huxley May 1983.” The recipient, Joe Ferrier was a fan and pen pal of Huxley’s. They often exchanged letters, books, and article clippings between England and the United States. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Judith Kazdyn Leeds.

Nellie and Major Josceline Grant arrived in Thika, in what was then British East Africa in 1912 where they became colonial settlers and established a coffee plantation. Their daughter, Elspeth had quite an unconventional childhood which she later wrote about in her best known work The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) which examined how unprepared for rustic life the early British settlers really were. Nellie's Story is a further examination of the family's life including her witnessing of the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s and the emergence of of a new Africa in the 1960s.