KAREN BLIXEN: A Romantic Life, 1885- 1962

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”- Out of Africa

Karen Blixen/Isak Dineson (pen name)

“To be lonely is a state of mind, something completely other than physical solitude; when modern authors rant about the soul’s intolerable loneliness, it is only proof of their own intolerable emptiness.” – Out of Africa, 1937

I know the cure for everything: Salt water...in one form or another: Sweat, tears or the sea.– The Deluge at Norderney, Seven Gothic Tales, 1934

Who lives lives like this anymore? Karen Blixen.....What a beautiful and breathtakingly adventurous life she led. No “safety” for her.......courageous from head to toe....1885 - 1962.

copied from research:

Karen Blixen was born Karen Dinesen was born on 17 April 1885 north of Copenhagen, as the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, and his wife Ingeborg, nee Westenholz, From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark. Wilhelm Dinesen hanged himself in 1895, when Karen was ten. He suffered from syphillis, as later did Karen Blixen, which resulted in bouts of deep depression.

Karen spent some of her early years at her mother’s family home. She was later schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome. She began publishing fiction in Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola.

In 1913, Karen Dinesen became engaged to her second-cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after a failed love affair with his brother. The couple moved to Kenya, which was at the time part of British East Africa. In early 1914, they used family money to establish a coffee plantation there, hiring local workers; predominantly the Kikuyu people who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival. About the couple’s early life in the African Great Lakes region, Karen Blixen later wrote,

Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!

Though Danish, Blixen wrote her books in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Critics describe her English as having unusual beauty. Her later books usually appeared simultaneously in both Danish and English

On returning to Denmark, Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the US in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. This first book, highly enigmatic and more metaphoric than Gothic, won great recognition, and publication of the book in Great Britain and Denmark followed. Her second book, now the best known of her works, was Out of Africa, published in 1937, and its success firmly established her reputation as an author. She was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat (a Danish prize for women in the arts or academic life) in 1939.

Karen Blixen’s health began to fail in the 1950’s. She had well chronicled abdominal problems. The source of her abdominal problems remains unknown, although she had gastric syphilis, manifested by gastric ulcers during secondary and tertiary syphilis.

Unable to eat, Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family’s estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition.

“will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”  I am sure they have, Karen...quite sure.