Karen Blixen, the Danish author also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen, is celebrated for her memoir Out of Africa (1937) and the story Babette’s Feast (1958). Beyond these iconic works, Blixen crafted numerous short stories, poems, plays, and essays.
Born Karen Christentze Dinesen on April 17, 1885, in Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, she was the daughter of Wilhelm Dinesen, a writer, army officer, and politician, and Ingeborg Westenholz, from a wealthy merchant family. Karen was the second oldest in a family of three sisters and two brothers.
Blixen's life at Rungstedlund changed significantly after her father's death. From the age of 10 years, her life was dominated by her mother's Westenholz family. Unlike her brothers, who attended school, she was educated at home by her maternal grandmother and by her aunt, Mary B. Westenholz.
According to her biographer Donald Hannah, Blixen’s attitude to life shaped her work. The characters in her books are stylized to their roles because accepting one’s role in life is key to finding purpose. Role, purpose, fate, and destiny are intertwined in Blixen’s work. In Hannah’s reading, she was trying to unravel the marionette strings that keep people from finding a clear sense of purpose. In this way she hoped to help others.
Karen Blixen: The Storyteller Who Lived Among Lions
Blixen began writing as a child. She told Hannah that she and her siblings acted out some of her work, like The Marionette Plays. One of them in particular, Sandhedens Hoevn (Revenge of the Truth, published in 1926), shows that Blixen was preoccupied with the idea of fate and a person’s role in life from an early age. In the story, the plot turns the children into marionettes. Then a witch casts a spell so that “any lie they tell eventually becomes the truth.” Unable to escape their given role, the characters have to accept their new reality and make the best of it.
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Karen Blixen in 1960, photographed by Cecil Beaton
Life in Africa
Although Blixen sometimes wrote under a pseudonym, Isak Dinesen being her most frequent choice, she wrote Out of Africa as Karen Blixen. The book was her memory of the seventeen years she lived in Africa as coffee plantation owner Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke. It began in late 1913 when the 28-year-old boarded a ship in Denmark. She arrived in Mombasa in January 1914, and married her betrothed, the Swedish Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, the very same day.
Early in 1913, Bror left for Kenya. Soon after Dinesen arrived in Kenya, which at the time was part of British East Africa, she and Blixen were married in Mombasa on 14 January 1914. After her marriage, she became known as Baroness Blixen and she used the title until her then ex-husband remarried in 1929. Bror had attended agricultural college at Alnarp and then managed the Stjetneholm farm within the Nasbyholm estate.
The role of Baroness, landowner and plantation owner meant she was responsible for staff, harvests, finances, social activities, and more. These responsibilities became part of her purpose in life. But very soon after her marriage, she was diagnosed with syphilis. Painful mercury treatments and surgeries followed. The plantation suffered bad harvests and financial problems. To deal with the peaks and troughs of her new role, Blixen turned to her writing. By 1931 she had lost everything-marriage, hope of children, love, land, work, and money-and left Kenya to live with her widowed mother in Denmark.
It was a particularly difficult time for her. Hannah explained that Blixen believed suffering to be part of life and refused to be consumed by it. Instead, she carried on exploring the connection of role and purpose in her writing.
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Mombasa, Kenya
Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony known today as Kenya. When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to 2,400 ha (6,000 acres). She was well suited to the work - fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers.
But the climate and soil of her particular tract were not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields as well as a pestilence of grasshoppers one season - and the falling market price of coffee was no help. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it.
Blixen moved back to the family's estate of Rungstedlund (in Rungsted, Denmark) to live with her mother, and took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a fiction collection, Seven Gothic Tales, and in 1937 her Kenyan memoir, Out of Africa. The book's title was likely derived from the title of a poem, "Ex Africa," she had written in 1915, while recuperating in a Danish hospital from her fight with syphilis.
"Out of Africa": A Memoir of a Life Lived
Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the eighteen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades under the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish.
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Out of Africa is divided into five sections, most of which are non-linear and seem to reflect no particular chronology. The first two focus primarily on Africans who lived or had business on the farm, and include close observations of native ideas about justice and punishment in the wake of a gruesome accidental shooting. The third section, called “Visitors to the Farm,” describes some of the more colourful local characters who considered Blixen's farm to be a safe haven. In the fifth and final section, “Farewell to the Farm,” the book begins to take on a more linear shape, as Blixen details the farm's financial failure, and the untimely deaths of several of her closest friends in Kenya.
Out of Africa has been noted for its melancholy and elegiac style - Blixen biographer Judith Thurman employs an African tribal phrase to describe it: “clear darkness.” It is not an insignificant fact that Blixen's tales encompass the deaths of at least five of the important people in the book. As the chapters proceed, Blixen begins to meditate more plainly on her feelings of loss and nostalgia for her days in Africa.
But Blixen's wistfulness is fueled and informed by a loss greater than her own farm: the loss of Kenya itself. In the first two decades of the 20th century, many of Kenya's European settlers saw their colonial home as a kind of timeless paradise. Settlement was sparse; life followed the slow, dreamy rhythms of annual dry and rainy seasons. A few thousand European colonists, many of them well-educated Britons from the landed gentry, held dominion over vast plantation estates covering tens of thousands of acres. Their farms were home to herds of elephants and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards - to a culture accustomed to the traditional pleasures of European aristocrats, Kenya was a hunter's dream.
This belief in Kenya as a pre-historic Utopia left its mark on its inhabitants (and remained an idealised world of the imagination even for generations that came after). But by the time that Blixen was finishing the manuscript for Out of Africa at the age of 51, the Kenya protectorate of her younger years was a thing of the past. Aggressive agricultural development had spread the colony's human footprint far out into the game country; many of the new farmers were middle class retired Army officers recruited by a government settlement programme after the First World War. The popularity of hunting safaris, especially after Roosevelt's world-famous journey in 1909, had depleted the big herds precipitously.
Karen Blixen's Farm in Kenya
Key Figures in Blixen's World
The other characters who populate Out of Africa are the Europeans - colonists as well as some of the wanderers who stopped in Kenya. Foremost among them is Denys Finch Hatton, who was for a time Blixen's lover after her separation and then her divorce from her husband.
The Hon. Denys Finch Hatton - Blixen's portrait of Finch Hatton is as a kind of philosopher king, a man of exceptional erudition and natural grace, at one with nature, who fit in everywhere and nowhere: “When he came back to the farm, it gave out what was in it - it spoke… When I heard his car coming up the drive, I heard, at the same time, all the things of the farm telling what they really were.” Such glowing reports of the aristocratic Finch Hatton are not uncommon; by all accounts he radiated, from a young age, a kind of warmth and serenity that many people found irresistible.
But while Blixen is generally believed to have been Finch Hatton's lover, and she writes of him with unbridled adoration, in Out of Africa at least she refrains from ever clearly defining the nature of their relationship. Finch Hatton came from a titled British family and was educated at Eton and Oxford. But he turned his back on his British noblesse, and came to Africa in 1911, at the age of 24. He began as a farmer and trader, but later became a white hunter - and he was well liked by many Africans. Blixen met Finch Hatton at a dinner in 1918. He was, to judge by Blixen's correspondence as well as some passages from Out of Africa, the great love of her life.
Other significant characters include:
- Farah Aden: When Blixen first met Farah, she mistook him for an Indian. However, Farah was a Somali of the Habr Yunis, a tribe of fierce, handsome and shrewd traders and cattle-dealers. It was common among the British colonists of the early period to hire Somalis as major-domos. According to Dinesen's biographer Judith Thurman, “it was upon meeting Farah in Mombasa that Dinesen’s Vita Nuova (new life) truly began.” Blixen entrusted Farah with the farm's cash flow, and eventually with her complete trust.
- Kamante Gatura: A young boy crippled by running sores when he enters Blixen's life, Kamante was successfully treated by the doctors at the “Scotch" Christian mission near the farm, and thereafter served Blixen as a cook and as a wry, laconic commentator on her choices and her lifestyle. There is a strong suggestion that Blixen and Kamante were well suited as friends because both were loners and sceptics, who looked at their own cultures with the critical eye of the misfit.
- The Hon. Berkeley Cole: Cole was, like Finch Hatton, a British expatriate improvising a charmed life among the colony's well-to-do. He was a veteran of the Boer War, a possessor of a sly wit who affected a dandy's persona in the Kenya colony. Cole was a close friend of Finch Hatton and the two men supplied Blixen with much of the wine she served on her farm.
- Kinanjui: Kinanjui was “the big chief” of Blixen's neighborhood - “a crafty old man, with a fine manner, and much real greatness to him,” British colonial authorities had appointed him the highest-ranking chief among the Kikuyu in Blixen's region because they couldn't get along with his predecessor; as such he was a significant authority figure for the Kikuyu who lived on her farm.
Conspicuously absent from the stories in Out of Africa is any explicit appearance by Blixen's husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke. Although the Blixens remained friendly through their separation and divorce, Bror's associations with other women caused Karen embarrassment.
Literary Style and Themes
Almost all of Blixen's tales from the 1940s and 1950s follow a traditional style of storytelling, weaving Gothic themes such as incest and murder with myth and bewitchment as a means of exploring identity, morality and philosophy. Most also take place against the background of the 19th century or earlier periods. Concerning her deliberately old-fashioned style, Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, one of being rather than doing. Her narratives hover between skillfully crafted illusion and romanticism, with a keen knowledge of the preferred tastes of her audience.
Blixen examines the details and ethical implications of two separate “trials". The first is African: a gathering of tribesmen on her farm to adjudicate the case of a Kikuyu child who accidentally killed one playmate and maimed another with a shotgun. This process seems largely devoid of Western-style moral or ethical considerations: most of the energy expended in deliberations is directed at determining the proper amount of reparation the perpetrator's father must pay, in livestock, to the families of the victims.
Later, Blixen describes a British colonial criminal trial in Nairobi: the defendant is European settler Jasper Abraham who is accused of causing, by intention or indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named Kitosch. These two trials, separated by most of the book, may also be part of a deeper exploration by Blixen into one of her pet notions: the “Unity” of contrasts. Two homogenous units will never be capable of forming a whole… Man and woman become one… A hook and an eye are a Unity, a fastening, but with two hooks you can do nothing. Her life in Africa offered her no shortage of such contrasting dualities: town and country, dry season and rainy season, Muslim and Christian.
Although Blixen was unavoidably in the position of landholder, and wielded great power over her tenants, Blixen was known in her day for her respectful and admiring relationships with Africans - a connection that made her increasingly suspect among the other colonists as tensions grew between Europeans and Africans. “We were good friends,” she writes about her staff and workers.
But Blixen does understand - and thoughtfully delineates - the differences between the culture of the Kikuyu who work her farm and who raise and trade their own sheep and cattle, and that of the Maasai, a volatile warrior culture of nomadic cattle-drovers who live on a designated tribal reservation south of the farm's property. Her descriptions of Africans and their behaviour or customs sometimes employ some of the racial language of her time, deemed now to be abrasive, but her portraits are frank and accepting, and are generally free of perceptions of Africans as savages or simpletons. She transmits a sense of logic and dignity of ancient tribal customs.
Legacy and Adaptations
In 1960, at the age of 76, Blixen published Shadows on the Grass, a short compendium of further recollections about her days in Africa. Many of the people and the events from Out of Africa appear again on these pages.
Sydney Pollack directed a film adaptation in 1985, starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. The film is less a direct adaptation of the book than it is a love story. Written by Kurt Luedtke and drawing heavily on two biographies of Blixen, it is a compressed chronological recounting of Blixen's Kenyan years that focuses particularly on her troubled marriage and her affair with Finch Hatton. Some of Blixen's more poetic narration and a few episodes from the book do appear in the film, such as Blixen's work running supply waggons during the war, the farm's fire and its financial troubles, and her struggles to find a home for her Kikuyu squatters.
The film adaptation of Out of Africa won 7 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Karen Blixen died on September 7, 1962, in Rungstedlund, Denmark, leaving behind a legacy of remarkable literary works that continue to captivate readers worldwide.
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