Joy Adamson

Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson ( Gessner; 20 January 1910 – 3 January 1980) was a Czech-born Austrian-Kenyan naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages and made into an Academy Award–winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

Biography Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner ( Greipel) in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me".

She grew up on an estate near Opava in the village called Kreuzberg (now Kružberk, Czech Republic). With the outbreak of the WWI she had moved to Vienna earning a music degree before studying sculpting and medicine. As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine.

Adamson married three times in the span of ten years. Her first marriage in 1935 was to Viktor von Klarwill.

She went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter Bally, who gave her the nickname "Joy". Bally did botanical paintings, and it was he who encouraged her to continue sketching and painting the flora and fauna in her surroundings. She met her third husband, wildlife warden George Adamson, while on safari in the early 1940s and married him in 1944. They made their home together in Kenya.

During Elsa's lifetime, the Adamsons needed each other to educate her, but after she died and her cubs were taken in by the park, their interests went in separate directions, as did their lives. While neither wanted a divorce nor a legal separation, their conflicting interests (George wanted to continue to work with lions and she with cheetahs) made it necessary for them to live apart (though they sometimes discussed living together again, they never did). They spent each Christmas together and they remained on good terms.

Using her own notes and George's journals, Joy wrote Born Free to tell the lion's tale. She submitted it to a number of publishers before it was bought by Harvill Press, part of HarperCollins. Published in 1960, it became a bestseller, spending 13 weeks at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and nearly a year on the chart overall. The success of the book was due to both the story of Elsa and the dozens of photographs of her. Readers had pictures of many of the events of Elsa's life leading up to her release. Subsequent books were also heavily illustrated. Born Free received largely favorable reviews from critics. Adamson worked closely with publishers to promote the book, which contributed to the Adamsons' new-found international celebrity.

She spent the rest of her life raising money for wildlife, thanks to the popularity of Born Free. The book was followed by Living Free, which is about Elsa as a mother to her cubs, and Forever Free, which tells of the release of the cubs Jespah, Gopa and Little Elsa. Adamson shared book proceeds with various conservation projects.

A book of her paintings, Joy Adamson's Africa, was published in 1972. She rehabilitated a cheetah and an African leopard. Pippa the cheetah was raised as a pet and given to Adamson at the age of seven months in hopes that she could also be released. Pippa had four litters before her death. Adamson wrote The Spotted Sphinx and Pippa's Challenge about Pippa and her cheetah family. Later, Adamson reached her goal of many years, when she obtained an African leopard cub. Penny was eight weeks old when a ranger acquaintance of George Adamson found her in 1976. Penny had a litter of two cubs before the publication of Queen of Shaba, Adamson's posthumous and final book.

During her lifetime, she created more than 500 paintings and line drawings. Her work included portraits of the indigenous populations commissioned by the government of Kenya, as well as botanical illustrations for at least seven books on East African flora. She also did animal paintings, among them studies of Elsa and Pippa.

Murder and legacy

On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Pieter Mawson. He assumed she had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media. She was a few weeks short of her 70th birthday.

A subsequent police investigation found that Adamson's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded she had been murdered. Paul Nakware Ekai, a discharged labourer formerly employed by Adamson, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. He escaped capital punishment because the judge ruled he might have been a minor when the crime was committed.

Adamson was cremated and her ashes were buried in Elsa the Lioness's grave in Meru National Park in Meru, Kenya.

In addition to Adamson's books about big cats, a book of her artwork was published as an autobiography entitled The Searching Spirit.