An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 'A masterpiece of biography ... a vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great cultural shifts of the modern era' John Gray, New Statesman 'The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through some branch of this sprawling family tree' The Guardian In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the seemingly endless survey mission of HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species, one among many. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and - perhaps above all - as public lecturers, educators and explainers. Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original new book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women. 'This is history with the engaging intimacy of a novel. Bashford brilliantly marries intellectual history with the story of four generations in a literary tour de force' Professor Jim Secord, author of Visions of Science

About the Author :
Alison Bashford is Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of Humanities and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Society (NSW) History and Philosophy of Science Medal for transformative historical studies of the biomedical and environmental sciences. In 2021 she was awarded the Dan David Prize for scholarship in the history of medicine.

Review :
A vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great cultural shifts of the modern era ... a masterpiece of biography. An intellectual history of Britain through the radical shifts in science and society that gave birth to modernity ... The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through some branch of this sprawling family tree. Balancing scholarly rigour with an eye for the absurd, her book reveals the human drama behind scientific fact. What a family, what a story, and so cleverly told. Alison Bashford constructs a narrative that intertwines the lives of four generations of Huxleys, boldly forgoing traditional chronology for illuminating synthesis. Absolutely fascinating. Superbly original and evocatively stylish ... Bashford has ingeniously created a loosely chronological account that weaves their own lives and experiences within ever-shifting attitudes towards evolution. A patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws. A detailed, nuanced, and superbly written joint biography of the intellectual lineage of the Huxleys ... rich and compelling ... Bashford elegantly reminds us that science has never banished the sacred for the secular, the irrational for the logical. Rather, it creates opportunities for new syntheses, new configurations of life, mind, soul, body, nature, and society. Ambitious, scholarly ... a biography of ideas, using one family's history to explore the development of theories about generations, genealogy and genes, chronicling shifting attitudes to religion, race, women and animal experimentation - from morphology to ethology. Lucid, lively and addictive ... a panoramic view of an era of extraordinary and accelerated change ... a celebration of intellectual bravery. I was captivated from beginning to end by the richness of the detail, the flaws and all personal biographies and most of all blown away by the intimate narrative of how the biggest science stories of the age had a Huxley as ringmaster or provocateur at their heart.