On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Joy Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (sometimes reported as Pieter Mawson). After the book was written and 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.Īfter Elsa died, George and Joy Adamson separated and were not together after 1971. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them. They were successful in the end, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known to have cubs. They decided to set her free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. It was during her marriage to George Adamson that she lived in tent camps in Kenya and first met Elsa, the topic of her famous book Born Free. The Colonial Government of Kenya commissioned her to paint portraits of members of 22 tribes whose culture was vanishing. 600 of her paintings now belong to the National Museum of Kenya. Viktor sent her to Africa, Bally influenced her painting and drawing of the people and the plant life of Africa. Her husbands were Viktor von Klarwill (Ziebel) 1902-1985, (Jewish Austrian), the botanist Peter Bally (divorced in 1942), who gave her the nickname "Joy", and lastly game warden George Adamson. She married 3 times in the span of ten years. 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."Īdamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine, but did not take her finals in medicine, instead chosing to get married.
After the divorce of her parents, Joy went to live with her grandmother. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.īorn to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic) and was the 2nd of 3 girls. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. Joy Adamson (born Friederike Victoria Gessner) was a naturalist, artist, and author best known for her book, Born Free, which describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa.
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