Aldous Huxley
by Alexandra Hamilton, Lenai Clarke and Darcey Stopka

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was born in Godalming to an intellectual family associated with science, education, and literature.

He spent much of his childhood in Surrey, where he grew to admire the natural landscape. He was educated at the local preparatory school, Hillside School. He and his family moved to Prior's Field, where his mother, Julia Huxley, founded Prior’s Field School. Her early death in 1908, during his education at Eton College, was a profound loss for Huxley. In 1911 he was forced to withdraw from Eton after contracting keratitis punctata, an eye infection that left him partially blind for several years. As a result, he abandoned his ambition of pursuing a career in medicine. After recovering, he enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, to study English literature, where he developed his literary interests. His time at Oxford was a difficult period.

In 1914 the outbreak of World War I caused widespread hardship, and his brother, Noel Huxley, died by suicide. Huxley was unable to enlist due to his eyesight and instead contributed to the war effort as a farm labourer in Garsington in 1916, where he met Lady Ottoline Morrell. Her home was a gathering place for many influential thinkers of the period, called the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and he met his future wife here, Maria Nys, whom he married in 1919. His first novel Crome Yellow (1921) is loosely based on his time here, satirising the group. He worked at Eton College in 1917 as a temporary schoolmaster. When the schoolmasters returned from the war, he began working as a writer for the journal The Athenaeum in London.

Huxley’s work began as an essayist in Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a tourist in 1925; consisting of twenty-two essays that that offer a satirical - and often a self-deprecating - look into tourists. During this time Huxley was living in Spain and Italy and extended his residence in Bandol and Sanary-sur-Mer on the Frech Riviera; where he and Nys would travel into London from to see productions of his plays such as The World of Light (1931). It is also where Huxley published his most famous novel which enhanced his reputation as one of the greatest British novelists of the time, Brave New World (1932).

In pursuit of a better environment, Huxley and Nys travelled to California in the spring of 1937. It is there where Huxley begins writing screen plays such as Madame Curie (1938), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Jane Eyre (1943), and continued to do so until the break of the Second World War. As a pacifist he refused to write American patriotic war films thereafter. He did however write an autobiographical study on the methods used by D.W.E Bates, which helped his own poor vision. In the last years of his life, he refused to speak publicly after his oral cancer diagnosis, and he died on November 22, 1963. He rests in Watts Cemetery Chapel in Compton, Surrey. 

Images: 
Aldous Huxley by Henri Manuel, 1925. Creative Commons.
Prior's Field School. Alexandra Hamilton.