ABSTRACT
In February 1955, Maria Huxley succumbed after a long and painful bout with breast cancer. Aldous Huxley, who had begun experimenting with drugs, an activity that Grace Burke disapproved of, grew more distant, and they saw little of one another after his marriage to Laura Archera in 1956. Grace heard that Enrico Fermi and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, both members of the Nobel Committee, had joined their colleagues in unanimously voting Edwin Hubble the prize in physics, a rumor later confirmed by the astronomers Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge after speaking with “Chandra”. Though a number of individuals, both male and female, set out to write Hubble’s life, Grace refused to correspond with or to be interviewed by any of them, and their projects, for one reason or another, never reached fruition. Hubble could spot a firefly 10,000 miles distant or home in on a small battery-powered flashlight held by an astronomer standing on the surface of the moon.
