Travel to Novel Places: Colonial Kenya

Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife, has a new novel: Circling the Sun.  It focuses on the early life of Beryl Markham, a horse trainer and one of the first female commercial pilots. Coming to what would become Kenya at a young age and abandoned by her mother, Beryl grows up wild on her father's farm. After a disastrous first marriage, Beryl meets the pilot and safari guide Denys Finch Haddon and enters into a love triangle with him and Karen Blixen.  Haddon encourages Beryl to fly, and the book starts and ends with her historic flight from England to North America. All the while, Beryl fights to be recognized in the man's world of horse training and racing, falling only to rise again. While the exotic locale is definitely a draw, the well-developed characters and the drama of Beryl's life is what will make this book worth reading.

Beryl Markham herself wrote a memoir of her time in Kenya: West With the Night. Her physical descriptions are especially memorable.

Karen Blixen (writing as Isak Dinesen) had a long writing career, most famously Out of Africa. Unlike the movie Out of Africa, the real romance is Blixen's with the landscape of colonial Kenya. She writes what for the time was a very sympathetic view of the African tribes, and when her coffee plantation finally fails she tries to make sure their territorial rights are respected.

Elspeth Huxley also wrote autobiographical fiction, and the book covering her childhood is The Flame Trees of Thika. Like Beryl Markham, Huxley is a British expat, brought to Kenya at an early age so that her parents can farm. She too is entranced with Africa and hangs out often with the native children. Older than Markham when she comes to colonial Kenya, she has a certain degree of culture shock that Markham does not. Huxley learns to love Kenya, and like everyone, is sad to leave. In the early 1980s, a miniseries was made of Huxley's book, also called The Flame Trees of Thika.