I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
This is how Karen Blixen starts her probably most famous novel Out of Africa, which has been hailed as the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism. She lived in Africa for 17 years of her life and this inspired her to write Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. She wrote them, and many of her other novels, under the well-known pen name Isak Dinesen.
Karen Blixen's compelling prose has captured an international audience, a phenomenon facilitated by her ability to write in English, as well as her native tounge, Danish.
Her fantastic plot structures and spectacular life have attracted numerous filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Sydney Pollak.
Karen Blixen wrote in English and made her debut in 1934 in USA with Seven Gothic Tales under the pseudonym "Isak Dinesen". When the book was published in Denmark the year after the reviews span from "ingenious" to "perverse". She also wrote the novel "Ways of Vengeance" under the alias Pierre Andrezel. All her life Karen Blixen was both as a person and author a provocative, controversial figure in Danish culture.

Karen Blixen was born on April 17th 1885. The daughter of Wilhelm Dinesen and Ingeborg Westenholz.
Her family called her "Tanne", which was her own mispronunciation of Karen and a nickname - forever diminutive - that she disliked.
She had four siblings - Inger Benedicte (Ea), Ellen Alvilde (Elle), Thomas Fasti and Anders Runsti. Karen was the second oldest child in the Dinesen family.
She was her father's favourite child; the heir to his talent, charisma, and instability. He committed suicide in 1895 when she was only ten years old. It has been conjectured that his suicide was induced by a political setback after a long period of depression, caused by the prospect of complete physical and mental disablement resulting from syphilis, contracted many years earlier and never cured.
Ingeborg Dinesen, supported by Mama and Aunt Bess, was now alone responsible for bringing up the five young children at Rungstedlund. The daughters are not sent to school but are taught by a governess who gives them - together with their female relatives - an unsystematic, in certain ways inadequate but otherwise highly qualified cultural and linguistic education. But the absence of a masculine counterweight to the dominating influence of pious and strong women already now, in childhood, instigates in Karen Blixen a silent but fierce opposition to her elders' demand for respect for bourgeois virtues, such as thrift, modesty and spotless moral conduct; and the Unitarian view of Christianity of the maternal side of her family, at least where Karen Blixen is concerned, seems to have fallen on barren ground. All three daughters show artistic talent, Ea and Elle mostly in the field of music, while Karen Blixen has been both drawing and writing from her early years. Numerous exercise books containing youthful drafts of poems, plays, and stories have been preserved.
Her widowed mother had few social contacts and was "not very sociable" according to Karen Blixen's brother Thomas. In her youth Karen attended Miss Sode's Art School in Copenhagen and the Academy of Art in Copenhagen. She was very interested in art.

Early publications
In 1907, she makes her debut as a writer (under the pseudonym Osceola) with the story "The Hermits", published in the August issue of Tilskueren, a Danish literary journal. Another story, "The Ploughman", is published (likewise pseudonymously) in the October issue of the periodical Gads danske Magasin.
In 1909, The story "The de Cats Family" is published in the January issue of Tilskueren. None of Karen Blixen's early stories attract any particular attention and Karen Blixen loses the impulse to continue writing because of the lack of encouragement.

Young love
At age 24, she falls deeply but unhappily in love with Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke (1886-1917) of Näsbyholm in Sweden, son of her father's cousin. This, however, does not work out. On December 23:rd, 1912, she instead becomes engaged to Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke (1886-1946), twin brother of Hans.
The young couple decides to find happiness in Africa and Bror Blixen goes to British East Africa, recommended as the land of the future for enterprising young people. A newly founded family limited company in Denmark with Aage Westenholz as chairman and a considerable capital deposit mainly provided by Karen Blixen's maternal family, makes it possible for him to acquire "M'Bagathi", a Swedish-owned coffee farm; despite his ignorance of both agriculture and book-keeping, he is appointed manager of the farm by the company - a disastrous arrangement. On December 2, 1913, Karen leaves Denmark to travel via Naples to a new life in Africa.

Africa
Karen Blixen arrives in the port of Mombassa January 14, 1914, and the same day she married Bror. They were married by the Swedish Consul Åke Sjögren at the District Commissioners office and Bror's best man was Prince Wilhelm of Sweden.
World War 1 began on August 5, 1914, it included the East African colonies governed by Germany and Britain and therefore came to affect Karen Blixen's life in Africa. On account of their connection with the Swedish colony in British East Africa, Karen and Bror are accused, completely without cause, of being pro-German in spite of their voluntary and courageous contribution to the Allied war effort as leaders of the despatch service and provision transports.
Shortly after the wedding Karen Blixen learned that she got the venereal disease syphilis and was treated with mercury tablets, but this remedy later proved to have been ineffective and a health risk. After the first year of marriage she had to go home to Denmark in 1915 to be treated for it. An extremely difficult journey through war-torn France, Switzerland and Germany. In Copenhagen she is hospitalised at the National Hospital for three months and then she goes to stay with her mother at Rungstedlund. Having a venereal disease must have had a crippling effect on her relationships with the opposite sex from that on. Most of her futuree relationships were platonic.
While in Denmark, Karen Blixen writes the poem, "Ex Africa", in which she portrays the country she had to leave so suddenly.
The family company is confident of the future of The Karen Coffee Co., and acquires a larger farm outside Nairobi for the Blixen couple. Bror Blixen comes to Denmark in the summer of 1916, and in November he returns to Africa with Karen to take over the management of the new farm. Soon, the lurking crisis in Karen Blixen's marriage becomes permanent. Bror Blixen turns out to be totally incapable of managing the farm; he is completely unreliable with money.
In April 5, 1918 (age 33) she met her "living ideal", the English hunter and army pilot Denys Finch-Hatton. (He was born in London Apri1 24 1887, second son of Henry Stormont, thirteenth Earl of Winchilsea and eighth Earl of Nottingham.) Whether or not Denys and Karen became lovers in the true sense is not known.
On August 14, 1919 Karen and Bror Blixen travel via London to Denmark where they arrive in November. Bror Blixen proceeds to his family in Sweden; in March 1920 he returns to Kenya, as British East Africa is now called. Their marriage is breaking up. Karen Blixen stays with her mother for more than a year at Rungstedlund. During her visit to Denmark she is ill for five months, suffering from Spanish influenza and blood poisoning.
Before leaving for Kenya in March, Bror Blixen makes a written request to his wife for divorce. She refuses for the time being. In November Karen Blixen once again returns to Africa, now with Thomas Dinesen who is the representative of the family company; his job is to look at the situation and to help sort out the finances of the farm, which is now in a completely chaotic state. Bror Blixen is dismissed as manager, and Karen Blixen is appointed to run the farm, with the provision that Bror Blixen is not allowed to have anything to do with the plantation or The Karen Coffee Co. In 1921 Karen Blixen separates from her husband much against her wishes. The after effects of the mercury treatment for her old illness, whose development had been prevented a long time ago, now begin to be felt in earnest in the form of lengthy attacks of sudden pain.
In 1924, Denys Finch Hatton began to reside in her house when he was in Nairobi.
In 1925, Karen and Bror Blixen's divorce is made absolute and she goes to Denmark for eight months. There, she makes several futile attempts at making literary contacts in Denmark. The poem "Ex Africa" is published in Tilskueren.
She returns to Kenya on February 1, 1926. Karen Blixen's insecurity in her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton bring about a deep personal crisis. She struggles to come to terms with this partly by analysing its causes in depth in long letters to Thomas Dinesen.
The marionette play, The Revenge of Truth, which she wrote when she was a young girl, is published in the May issue of Tilskueren, not under a pseudonym as she had arranged but under her own name. The dream of becoming a writer is now encouraged again. Karen Blixen resumes the fiction writing of her youth while at the same time the collapse of the farm increasingly becomes inevitable.
In 1928, Bror Blixen marries Cockie Birkbeck. Socially, Karen Blixen finds herself in a difficult position in the English colony because of the new Baroness Blixen who takes part in the royal safaris arranged during the official visit of the Prince of Wales to Kenya from October to December; Bror Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton have been engaged as hunters to the prince.
In 1929, Ingeborg Dinesen falls seriously ill in Denmark. Karen Blixen leaves immediately for Denmark and stays at Rungstedlund from May 18 to December 25. She returns to Africa without any substantial hope of being able to salvage her African life. The relationship with Denys Finch Hatton is breaking up.
The farm came under the grip of the world-wide depression in 1930 and it has to be sold in March 1931. Karen Blixen undertakes to wind up the enterprise, to see to the harvesting of the last of the coffee and to guarantee the future of her black employees before returning to Denmark.
Karen Blixen lost Denys Finch-Hatton (age 44) in a plane crash on May 14, 1931. On August 19, after seventeen years in Kenya, she travels by boat from Mombassa and arrives in Marseilles where she is met by Thomas Dinesen, who accompanies her through Europe.

Back in Denmark
On August 31, totally ruined at the age of 46 she takes up residence with her mother at Rungstedlund. Ingeborg Dinesen supports her financially during the following years to help her make a new start in life. She herself doubts that she will be able to endure the kind of life which is now her lot - but by an incredible act of will and self-control she begins to complete a planned collection of stories, Nine Tales (later Seven Gothic Tales), in order to survive as a human being.
Now her writing career really took off. In 1934 Seven Gothic Tales was published and in 1937-1938 Out of Africa. Winter's Tales was published in 1942.
With her indomitable youthful courage, Karen Blixen in the ensuing years gathers a select circle of younger friends and colleagues around her at Rungstedlund, several of them associated with the group attached to the literary journal Heretica that appeared from 1948 to 1953. Future leaders of Danish intellectual life, such as Thorkild Bjørnvig, Jørgen Gustava Brandt, Aage Henriksen, Ole Wivel and Knud W. Jensen, the later founder of the Danish Museum of Modem Art, Louisiana, in the north of Sealand, were among the frequent guests at Rungstedlund.
She failed to recieve the Nobel Prize for Literature twice. In 1954 it was awarded to Ernest Hemingway and in 1957 it was awarded to Albert Camus.
Karen Blixen was a dominant figure in the cultural life of post-war Denmark - principally by virtue of her status as an internationally-renowned author, but also thanks to her charismatic personality and her frequently controversial contributions to the Danish discussion of cultural issues. In 1959 the took a high-profile trip to the United States, where she met with Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers among others. On January 28, she is guest of honour at the annual celebration of The National Institute of Arts and Letters where she is also guest speaker, talking "on Mottoes of My Life" (published in Daguerreotypes and Other Essays).
In 1961, Shadows on the Grass is published in the U.S.A. where it has been chosen as Book-of-the-Month.

Illness
In 1946 she had to undergo spinal surgery for abdominal pain and in 1955 she had surgery for an ulcer. A third of her stomach was removed.
She died peacefully at Rungstedlund from malnutrition on September 7th 1962, after being unconscious for twenty-four hours (aged 77). Karen Blixen was buried at the foot of Ewald's Hill at the Rungstedlund estate.

home | email | guestbook

This page was updated on August 9, 2002.

© 1998 - 2002 Anna Stéen