Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 70: Why a pseudonym?

Q. Why did she choose to write as Isak Dinesen?  Do you know what motivated her to write under an assumed name? I am very interested in her and her stories.  I just don't know why she didn't publish as Karen Blixen or Karen C. Dinesen, or Baroness Blixen, etc.

A. Karen Blixen realized that women's writing is not taken as seriously as that of men. For this reason she chose a pseudonym for sending her first work around to publishers.

However, authors have had a long tradition of using pseudonyms. One of Karen Blixen's most admired writers, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, used many different pseudonyms. Karen Blixen's father also used a pseudonym, Boganis.

The pseudonym allows the author to distance herself from what she has written, so that the reader, as Karen Blixen said in an interview, doesn't ask, "Did you really mean that?" "Is that really your view?" The author can pretend to be someone else to achieve a desired effect.

Karen Blixen was a master at disguising, reshaping, and recreating her life through the mask of a different name.

In the story "The Deluge at Norderney" her characters explain the value of a mask: "Where in all the world did you get the idea that the Lord wants the truth from us?", says Miss Malin. "Truth is for tailors and shoemakers...I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades...Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? ...nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself--with your permission--seems to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us."

The Cardinal answers, "The witty woman chooses for her Carnival costume one which ingeniously reveals something in her spirit or heart which the conventions of her everyday life conceal" (Seven Gothic Tales, pp.24-26).

Copyright © 2003 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved.