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Name: RIDDELL, Florence Gertrude

image of individual

Birth Date: 1892

Death Date: 1960

First Date: 1919

Profession: Novelist

Married: George Riddell (1888-1924)

Children: Donald Edward (1917)

Author: 'I Go Wandering, a Travel Biography', 'Kismet in Kenya', 'Castles in Kenya', 'Out of the Mist', 'Kenya Mist', 'The Misty Pathway'

Book Reference: Nicholls

General Information:

Nicholls - A new type of woman was seen in Kenya after the war [WW1], a person who stood in conspicuous contrast to the hard-working farmers' wives. C.T. Todd, recently arrived as a farm pupil, was astounded to see a topless white woman when he went visiting one day. He explained his surprise to himself by reasoning that in a community as small as Kenya's such people were so very obvious, whereas if they had remained in Britain, they would have been no more unusual than the other Bright Young Things. Some people reckoned that the rot started in 1924 with the publication of Florence K. Riddell's novel 'Kenya Mist'. The book sold 375,000 copies, and was reprinted 11 times before 1930. The author had come to Nairobi in 1919 with her businessman husband, and she ran a small private school. Her novel was a story of passion among affluent white renegades escaping the conventions of British society and the successful attempt by a woman settler to have a child outside marriage. It was serialised in the Daily Express under the title 'Love among the Lions'.
Nairobi Forest Road cemetery - George Riddell, British, age 36, died 27/5/24, drowning
I Go Wandering, a travel biography - Riddell (c.1885-1960) was a British author of romantic novels set in exotic locales. Here, however, she recounts the story of her own life, which included living in Kenya, Bombay, Calcutta, Bavaria, New York, and England and working as a governess, teacher, matron of a boarding house, and manager of a boarding school. The jacket notes that her life "has been filled with thrilling experiences," from encounters with cobras, panthers, and hostile natives to attacks of cholera and fever (which, in truth, sound less than thrilling).

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