Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), Beryl Markham, Elspeth Huxley – I’ve written about these three women before, but they are endlessly fascinating to me, and a recent re-read of Markham’s book ‘West with the Night’ reminded me of that.
All three are white women who lived in Africa for periods of
time, in British East Africa which became Kenya, and so all three were part of
that colonial period. All three wrote about it and from their writings it’s clear
that they loved that country, that it got into their hears and souls. Blixen
was Danish, both Huxley and Markham were British.
All three women were unusual for their time in the kinds of
lives they led. Blixen ran a coffee farm because her husband was mostly off
being a hunter and guide; she wrote about that in ‘Out of Africa.’ Markham was
the first woman to get her pilot’s license in Africa and she did a lot of flying
there, as well as becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from
east to west (1936). Huxley became a writer also and although she initially
advocated for the continuation of colonial rule, she later called for the
independence of African nations.
Markham and Blixen knew each other and apparently were
rivals for Denys Finch-Hatton, who was also a pilot and killed in a crash. Both
Blixen and Markham say in their writing that he’d asked them to go with them on
that last flight but neither woman mentioned the other.
I recently discovered that some people claimed that Markham
didn’t write ‘West with the Night’ but that her third husband, journalist Raoul
Schumacher did. The reasoning is that Markham never went to a regular school
but was taught at home by her father (her mother left when Beryl was very young).
Those claims have been discredited because drafts of the manuscript had been
shared with Markham’s publisher before she ever met Schumacher. And if you read
it, I think that you will discover her unique voice. Even if Schumacher helped
her with the editing, Markham would have had to tell him her story.
Karen Blixen’s book ‘Out of Africa’ was made into a movie
(1985, with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandaur), as was Elspeth
Huxley’s book ‘The Flame Trees of Thika (1981, with Hayley Mills). I’ve seen
both and enjoyed them. There’s also a film about Beryl Markham, which I haven’t
seen, called ‘A Shadow on the Sun’ (1988).
I learned recently that Karen Blixen was also a painter. Karen
Blixen Museum
Huxley lived to the age of 89 and died in England; Markham
died at 83 still raising horses in Kenya; Blixen died at 77 in Denmark.
