Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen Information Site

Karen Blixen (1885-1962), also known by her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen, is famous for her memoir, Out of Africa, and for several works of fiction, including Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter's Tales (1942). A 2007 poll of opinion in her native Denmark lists Karen Blixen as one of the most representative personalities in Danish history. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She wrote in English, after living on a coffee farm in Kenya from 1914 to 1931.

She married her second cousin, Baron Bror Blixen of Sweden, thereby acquiring the title Baroness. Following their separation and divorce, she had a long affair with the safari hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, son of a titled English family. In 1931, after losing the coffee farm in the Great Depression, Karen Blixen returned to Denmark and embarked on the writing career that lasted until her death in 1962. She was played by Meryl Streep in the 1985 film Out of Africa.

LITERATURE: Karen Blixen [Isak Dinesen] can be compared with no other writers. Her voice was formed by her Scandinavian roots, and influenced by a wide variety of works of European literature. Her writing places emphasis on story, rather than characters, and on the philosophical understanding of personal identity. Her stories underline a fascination with the role of fate in controlling the lives of human beings. She believed that a person's response to the vicissitudes of fate offers a possibility for heroism and, ultimately, for immortality.

A small selection of her literary influences include:

Soren Kierkegaard: at least thirteen of Isak Dinesen's tales are based, in part, on stories by the great Danish philosopher.
The Viking sagas

Shakespeare's plays

Mary Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lord Byron

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

Mozart's Don Juan
Milton's Paradise Lost
Charles Baudelaire
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Walt Whitman
Goethe
Nietzche
Heinrich Heine
Havamal, the bible of the pagan Scandinavian cosmos
The Greek myths
The Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)

The Old and The New Testament

Some of her famous characters:

From "The Deluge at Norderney": Malin Nat-og-Dag
From "The Dreamers" and "Echoes": Pellegrina Leoni
From Out of Africa: Kamante Gatura, Farah Aden, Denys Finch Hatton, Berkeley Cole

Photo KB age 29Photo KB age 43

MAP of Karen Blixen's World

THE STORY OF HER LIFE

Isak Dinesen first came to public attention in 1934 with her book Seven Gothic Tales. She was unable to find an interested publisher in England or Denmark, and was first published by Random House in the United States. From the beginning she was a mysterious figure; most readers thought she was a man.

Her tales were convoluted, weird, enigmatic, and sometimes erotic. Almost every sentence was like a prose poem. Each tale--taking place in another era--involved a complicated puzzle, a violent event, a case of mistaken identity, and an unexpected ending.

The tales offered an existential flavor in archaic disguise. They seized the imagination of the American public, where the collection was issued by the Book of the Month Club. The era loved short stories, which appeared universally in popular magazines.

In 1938, when a very different book, Out of Africa, was published by the same author, the reading public was tantalized to learn that Isak Dinesen was a Danish baroness, whose real name was Karen Blixen. Americans had long been fascinated with aristocracy, and wealthy young Americans--Cornelia Vanderbilt and Nancy Astor, among others--often married into titled European families.

The prose in Out of Africa displayed an entirely different kind of writing from Isak Dinesen's first book. Out of Africa looked back with nostalgia upon her life as a settler on a coffee plantation in Kenya. It presented a lyrical depiction of life on a colonial farm, with deaths, drought, and disappointments--as well as great and tragic friendships.

Isak Dinesen was among the first authors to describe Africans as individuals rather than as stereotypes. She has been criticized for participating in the colonial intrusion into Africa, and also for making poetic comparisons of various personalities--both Kenyans and white settlers--to birds and animals. She has often been labeled racist for her frank depiction of the power differences between Whites and Blacks in early twentieth century Africa.

Her memoir was arresting in many ways, especially in its oblique references to the author's love story with the English hunter Denys Finch Hatton. It left the reader tantalized by a series of enigmas: Who was the writer's husband, and what happened to him? Why didn't she and Finch Hatton marry? Did she ever plan to return to Africa? What was her life now?

The answers to these questions remained private until after her death. She had married a Swede named Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, her second cousin, from whom she took the title Baroness. Bror was the twin of the celebrated horseman, Hans von Blixen-Finecke, the man Karen was in love with in her youth. Bror himself wrote a book describing how he and his wife had set out to run a pioneer farm in Kenya. They divorced after eleven difficult years of marriage. She fought the divorce, and her Letters from Africa suggest that she loved her husband. Bror married again twice, but Karen did not remarry and never had children.

Her talent for hospitality in Kenya attracted a variety of aristocratic and bohemian friends, including Berkeley Cole. She called Denys Finch Hatton the love of her life, but the nature of their relationship has never been clear. She appears to have suffered two miscarriages during the eight or more years of the affair. However, the writer Beryl Markham, a friend of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, claimed to biographers that Finch Hatton was homosexual.

Due to the world wide economic depression and miscalculations in pioneer farming, Karen Blixen's coffee farm, financed by her family, never turned a profit. She was homesick much of her time in Africa. Although she had her farm for nearly 18 years, she spent nearly four years of that time in her beloved Denmark. She left Kenya in 1931 and never returned.

Karen Blixen's father Wilhelm Dinesen, a retired soldier from a wealthy family, had written books of essays on hunting. Her mother Ingeborg Westenholz came from a family of ship-owners. Both parents grew up on country estates on the Danish peninsula of Jutland. The Dinesens were connected to the royal circle, although not titled. The crusading Westenholzes often involved themselves in politics. Scholars have noted the differences between the families, but have failed to note their similarities: both families shared strong opinions on cultural ethics, and both cared little for high society. Wilhelm Dinesen's father A. W. Dinesen wrote an article critical of the French wars in North Africa. Ingeborg Westenholz's brother, Aage, and sister, Mary Bess, were both subjects of newspaper scrutiny for their political activism, as was Karen Blixen's sister Ea.

Ingeborg Westenholz Dinesen became the first woman in Denmark elected to a town council. Wilhelm Dinesen eventually won a seat in the Danish parliament. He committed suicide in 1895 (Karen was 10 years old)--reportedly because of syphilis, a disease he feared would lead to madness.

Her mother's family were strong Unitarians, in a country where the state religion was Lutheranism. No one, least of all Karen Blixen, has given her upbringing the credit it is due for her innovative approach to philosophy. She disapproved of any one-sided ideology. She appears to have consolidated her own beliefs from a variety of great works of literature, including the Old and New Testaments, but her fascination with fate was most influenced by her Scandinavian heritage.

She and her two sisters were educated at home, as was common for women of the wealthy class, while her two brothers went to school. She had written stories at an early age, the first of which were published when she was 22. She also studied art for a few years in Copenhagen, and her writing was influenced by her interest in painting. She grew up on a rural estate, where the differences between the peasant and upper classes made a deep impression on her. As Out of Africa reveals, she never lost her love for the peasants nor for the class system that existed in her youth.

She went on to write more collections of tales, a few essays, a novel, and another short memoir. Her stories emphasize the power of "the mask"--the public persona that reveals the hidden personality and draws attention to the talent of the artist. "By thy mask I shall know thee" was her credo. She made well-received readings on Danish radio, she was photographed wearing elaborate costumes, and she made a dramatic visit to the United States--home of her most enthusiastic reading public--where she related to audiences, in her deeply accented, sonorous voice, stories she had learned by heart.

Privately, the author suffered much of her life from a variety of illnesses that began when she lived in Africa. Her illnesses have been the subject of speculation by uninformed writers, and a wide variety of misinformation has been circulated about her.

Karen Blixen herself attributed her symptoms to syphilis acquired from her husband. However, her medical records do not support the diagnosis of syphilis late in life. She was first diagnosed with syphilis at the age of 29, a year after she married. She was prescribed mercury and arsenic, which were the treatment for the disease in her time. It is now believed that some of her later symptoms were the result of heavy metal poisoning. Late in life Karen Blixen suffered from a gastric ulcer, and a third of her stomach was removed--the only treatment available at that time. Late photographs show the malnutrition that resulted from the surgery. Some have labeled her thinness "anorexia," but no documents support these claims. Heavy smoking contributed to her ills.

When she left Kenya at the age of 46, she returned to the country manor called Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, where she was born, and she lived there as a writer until the end of her life. As in Africa, she was primarily dependent on her family for financial support. Her brother Thomas and sister Elle made it possible for her to keep the family home in Denmark, where the furniture had been bequeathed by family and friends. Karen Blixen's clothes were ordered from a tailor, and she had otherwise few possessions. Her writing helped pay for hired help. She employed a staff of workers that included a live-in cook and secretary. Toward the end of her life Karen Blixen appealed to the general public for contributions to protect her house and land. The successful campaign led to the creation of the Rungstedlund Foundation, which now oversees the 40-acre (16 hectare) property as a museum and bird reserve.

Karen Blixen was adventurous, within limits. Her husband taught her to hunt but she stopped hunting after the divorce. (She describes an occasional shooting expedition with Denys Finch Hatton, yet there is no evidence she ever went on safari with him.) During the First World War she once accompanied supplies for the colonial army. In the Second World War, she helped smuggle Jews out of German-occupied Denmark. She said she liked danger, and those who defied authority.

For a short time in old age, she fell in love with a much younger Danish poet, Thorkild Bjørnvig, but the relationship, based on mutual admiration, remained platonic. Young male writers, who at first came to Karen Blixen for support in their careers, later turned against her. Throughout her life she had been a magnetic figure with a range of important friends, but, as her physical ills mounted, she became increasingly difficult.

Evidence suggests she may have been dependent on amphetamines and perhaps on painkillers. She failed to win the Nobel Prize, although she was twice nominated, and, some said, this was because she was disliked by key personalities. Ernest Hemingway graciously said she should have won the prize instead of himself in 1954.

Karen Blixen died in 1962 at the age of 77, of malnutrition. Her books, first released in English and, later, in Danish, are still published in many languages. Great interest in the author revived with the release of the movie Out of Africa in 1985. Her homes have been converted to the Karen Blixen Museum near Nairobi and the Karen Blixen Museet in Denmark.

Isak Dinesen's writings are listed. Her life is also presented by chronology. A variety of films, books and articles analyzes Karen Blixen's contribution to literature.

KAREN BLIXEN - ISAK DINESEN

INFORMATION SITE