Elspeth Huxley: Gender, empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Women's History Review

Volumn 8, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 527-545

  Webster, Wendy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0013134209     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029900200219     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Bill Schwarz (1996) 'The only white man in there': the re-racialisation of England 1956-1968, Race and Class, 38, p. 65.
2. Although theories of women's auto/ biography have sometimes focused on differences between women's and men's writing, arguing that women's sense of self is less ego-focused and individuated, bound up in relationship to others rather than differentiation from them, the notion of women's communal identity has rarely been related to national community - a theme which is central to Huxley's autobiographical work. It is in feminist work on gender, nation and imperialism that colonising women's attachment to an imperial identity has been explored, as one amongst a complex range of responses to empire. See, for example, Margaret Strobel (1991) European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press);
3. Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel (Eds) (1992) Western Women and Imperialism: complicity and resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press);
4. Inderpal Grewal (1996) Home and Harem: nation, gender, empire and the cultures of travel (London: Leicester University Press);
5. Clare Mdgley (Ed.) (1998) Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
6. Western feminist historians have been criticised for rendering colonised women invisible in their recuperation of colonising women. See for example Jane Haggis (1990) Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender? recent women's studies approaches to white women and the history of British colonialism, Women's Studies International Forum, 13, pp. 105-115;
7. Jane Haggis (1998) White Women and Colonialism: towards a non-recuperative history, in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism. Huxley worked for the BBC during the second world war as liaison officer with the Colonial Office, presenting news about the war efforts in the colonies. She served on the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa in 1959.
8. Elspeth Huxley (1956 reprint edition) White man's country: Lord Delamere and the making of Kenya, vol. 1, pp. 81-83, (London: Chatto & Windus; first published 1935).
9. Lord Delamere (1870-1931) took on the leadership of the white settlers in Kenya in various conflicts with colonial officials and in 1930, just before his death, headed a deputation to London to put forward the settlers' point of view. Lord Lugard (1944) Introduction, in Elspeth Huxley & Margery Perham Race and politics in Kenya, a correspondence between Elspeth Huxley and Margery Perham, p. 3 (London: Faber). Lugard (1858-1945), like Delamere, was both an influential imperialist and big game hunter. For Margery Perham (1895-1982) see Alison Smith & Mary Bull (Eds) (1991) Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa (London; Frank Cass);
10. Barbara Bush (1998) 'Britain's Conscience on Africa': white women, race and imperial politics in inter-war Britain, in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism.
11. Quoted in Mcere Githae-Mugo (1978) Visions of Africa: the fiction of Chinua Achebe, Margaret Laurence, Elspeth Huxley and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, p. 14 (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau).
12. Chris Waters (1997) 'Dark Strangers' in Our Mdst: discourses of race and nation in Britain 1947-1963, Journal of British Studies, 36, p. 208.
13. For imperialism as masculine adventure, see Richard Phillips (1997) Mapping Men and Empire: a geography of adventure (London: Routledge).
14. Huxley, White Man's Country, vol. 1, p. 95.
15. Huxley & Perham, Race and Politics in Kenya, p. 17.
16. Elspeth Huxley (1964) Back Street New Worlds: a look at immigrants in Britain, pp. 46-47 (London: Chatto & Windus).
17. See especially Raphael Samuel (1989) Exciting to be English, in Raphael Samuel (Ed.) Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1, pp. xii-xv (London: Routledge);
18. Alison Light (1991) Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge).
19. Jeffrey Richards argues that the popularity of films depicting British imperial heroes and of the works of imperial thriller writers like John Buchan, Sapper and Edgar Wallace show that 'empire and imperial values remained central to interwar culture'. Jeffrey Richards (1997) Films and British National Identity: from Dickens to Dad's Army, p. 7 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
20. Huxley, Back Street New Worlds, p. 162.
21. See Lynn Segal (1988) Look Back in Anger: men in the fifties, in Rowena Chapman & Jonathan Rutherford (Eds) Male Order: unwrapping masculinity, pp. 84-85 (London: Lawrence & Wishart);
22. Alan Sinfield (1989) Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, pp. 76-7 (Oxford: Blackwell);
23. Sheila Jeffreys (1990) Anticlimax: a feminist perpsective on the sexual revolution, pp. 56-57 (London: Women's Press).
24. See Wendy Webster (1998) Imagining Home: gender, 'race' and national identity 1945-64 pp. 47-52 (London: UCL Press).
25. W. Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, 'race' and national identity 1945-64, Ibid., pp. 69-75.
26. Ferdynand Zweig (1961) The Worker in an Affluent Society: family life and industry, p. 208 (London: Heinemann).
27. John Ramsden (1998) Refocusing 'The People's War': British war films of the 1950s, Journal of Contemporary History, 33, pp. 56-57.
28. See John Hill (1986) Sex, Class and Realism: British cinema 1956-1963 (London: British Film Institute);
29. Mcheline Wandor (1987) Look Back in Gender: sexuality and the family in post-war British drama (London: Methuen, 1987);
30. Webster, Imagining Home.
31. Huxley's autobiographical trilogy comprised: Elspeth Huxley (1959) The Flame Trees of Thika: memories of an African childhood (London: Chatto & Windus);
32. Elspeth Huxley (1982 reprint edition) The Mottled Lizard (London: Chatto & Windus; first published 1962);
33. Elspeth Huxley (1968) Love among the Daughters (London: Chatto & Windus). She published a further autobiographical work on Kenya: Out in the Midday Sun: my Kenya (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987; first published 1985). Huxley's fictional writings on Africa are discussed in Githae-Mugo Visions of Africa;
34. David Maughan-Brown (1985) Land, Freedom and Fiction: history and ideology in Kenya (London: Zed Books).
35. Elspeth Huxley (1941) Atlantic ordeal: the story of Mary Cornish, p. 6 (London: Chatto & Windus).
36. For the history of the recruitment of Asian seamen - Lascars - to work on ships sailing between Britain and the East, see Rosina Visram (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London: Pluto). Visram notes that during the second world war increasing numbers of Lascars were employed on the fleet of merchant ships required to help the war effort, taking the place of European crews required for the navy.
37. Huxley, Atlantic Ordeal, p. 6.
38. See, for example, Marika Sherwood (1985) Many Struggles: West Indian workers and service personnel in Britain (London: Karia Press);
39. Ben Bousquet & Colin Douglas (1991) West Indian Women at War: British racism in world war II (London: Lawrence & Wishart).
40. Huxley describes The flame trees of Thika as 'a semi-fictional account of my childhood. which aimed at re-creating the atmosphere of the country in 1913-15 while not always sticking exactly to factual details'. When her parents emigrated to Kenya in 1912, she was left behind in the care of one of her mother's friends, "until they had found their patch of Africa and built some kind of dwelling on it', and arrived in Africa escorted by her mother's friend and a governess in 1913. See Elspeth Huxley (1980) Nellie: letters from Africa, pp. 27-28, 46-47 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
41. Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika, pp. 58-59.
42. For the history of Kenya as the prime hunting ground of the international elite, see John MacKenzie (1988) The Empire of Nature: hunting, conservation and British imperialism, pp. 160-161 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
43. Huxley, The Mottled Lizard, pp. 296-297.
44. Huxley, The Flame Trees, pp. 68, 58, 108, 110.
45. See Elspeth Huxley (1957) No Easy Way: a history of the Kenya Farmers' Association and UNGA Limited, pp. 16-17 (Nairobi: East African Standard).
46. Huxley, Love among the Daughters, p. 10.
47. Huxley, The Mottled Lizard, p. 47.
48. See Donna Haraway (1989) Primate Visions: gender, race and nature in the world of modern science, p. 53 (London: Routledge).
49. For the exclusion of Africans from hunting in Kenya see MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 209.
50. For representations of colonised women in a Middle Eastern or Asian setting, see Grewal, Home and Harem;
51. Reina Lewis (1996) Gendering Orientalism: race, femininity and representation (London: Routledge).
52. Jenny Sharpe (1993) Allegories of Empire: the figure of the woman in the colonial text, p. 143 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
53. Huxley, Nellie, p. 220.
54. Stuart Hall comments, '. the development of an indigenous British racism in the post-war period begins with the profoud historical forgetfulness - what I want to call the loss of historical memory, a kind of historical amnesia, a decisive mental repression - which has overtaken the British people about race and Empire since the 1950s. Paradoxically. the native, home-grown variety of racism begins with this attempt to wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past'. Stuart Hall (1978) Racism and reaction, in Five Views of Multi-racial Britain, p. 25 (London: Commission for Racial Equality). For the history of colonial nostalgia, including the resurrection of empire in the 1980s, see Annie Greet, Syd Harrex & Susan Hosking (Eds) (1992) Raj Nostalgia: some literary and critical implications (Adelaide: CRNLE).
55. For a discussion of feminist work heroinising women who challenged stereotypes see Dea Birkett & Julie Wheelwright (1990) How could she? unpalatable tacts and femininists' heroines, Gender and History, 2, pp. 48-63.
56. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire, p. viii.
57. Elspeth Huxley (1993) Introduction to Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, pp. 4-5 (London: Everyman).
58. See Wendy Webster (1990) Not a Man to Match Her: the marketing of a Prime Minister, pp. 82-85, 157-159, 166 (London: Women's Press).