A short life of the author
Karen Blixen (1885–1962), who published in English under the pen name Isak Dinesen, was born into the Danish aristocracy and lived one of the most dramatic lives in modern literary history: a failed marriage, a coffee farm in the Kenyan highlands, syphilis contracted from her husband, a great love affair, financial ruin, and a return to Denmark where, stripped of everything, she became one of the century’s most original writers. Her stories are unlike anything else in modern literature — aristocratic, fatalistic, formally intricate, saturated with a sense that life is a divine comedy in which human beings are God’s playthings.
Life and Career
Blixen was born at Rungstedlund, the family estate north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, was an adventurer and writer who had lived with the Chippewa Indians and fought in the Franco-Prussian War; he hanged himself when Karen was ten. She studied art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome before marrying her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. They moved to British East Africa to run a coffee farm near Nairobi.
The marriage was unhappy — Bror was unfaithful and gave her syphilis, which she lived with for the rest of her life — and they divorced in 1925. Blixen continued running the farm alone for six more years. She fell deeply in love with the English big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, who was killed in a plane crash in 1931. The farm failed, and she returned to Denmark, destitute, to live at Rungstedlund with her mother.
It was from this position of loss — “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” — that she began writing the works that made her famous. Seven Gothic Tales (1934) was published first in English (under the name Isak Dinesen) and then in Danish, an unusual choice for a Danish writer. The tales — set in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, populated by aristocrats, adventurers, and artists — are baroque, philosophical, and endlessly digressive, stories-within-stories that circle around questions of fate, identity, and the nature of storytelling itself.
Out of Africa (1937) is her masterpiece of memoir: an account of her seventeen years in Kenya written in a prose of biblical simplicity and grandeur. It was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1985 with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
Winter’s Tales (1942) was published during the German occupation of Denmark and smuggled to England and America. She continued writing through chronic illness — the syphilis caused progressive spinal deterioration — and produced Last Tales (1957) and Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), which includes “Babette’s Feast,” later filmed by Gabriel Axel.
Major Works and Themes
Blixen’s great subject is fate — the idea that human lives follow patterns determined by a power beyond individual will, and that the proper response to fate is not resistance but acceptance, even gratitude. Her stories are aristocratic in temperament: they value style, courage, and the willingness to play one’s assigned role with grace.
Babette’s Feast
“Babette’s Feast” (1958), from Anecdotes of Destiny, is Blixen’s most widely known single story — a parable about a French refugee who spends her entire lottery winnings on a single magnificent dinner for the austere Norwegian villagers who sheltered her. Gabriel Axel’s 1987 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and became one of the most beloved food films ever made. The story is quintessential Blixen: it argues that art — in this case, the art of cooking — is a form of grace, and that generosity is its own justification. The final line — “In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be” — captures Blixen’s conviction that artistry is a divine vocation.
The Africa Question
Blixen’s Out of Africa has been increasingly re-examined through postcolonial critique. Her relationship with the African landscape and its people was deeply felt but marked by the paternalism of her class and era. She wrote about the Kikuyu, Masai, and Somali people with genuine affection and respect for their cultures, but also with the assumption of European superiority that was the unreflected norm of colonial Kenya. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has criticised her portrait of Africans as romanticised and dehumanising. The debate about Out of Africa — whether it is a great work of literature marred by colonial assumptions, or a colonial fantasy dressed in beautiful prose — remains unresolved.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Blixen was a perennial Nobel Prize candidate who never won — a source of lasting grievance in Danish literary culture. She was admired by Hemingway, who publicly said the Prize should go to “that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.” Her reputation has grown since her death. The film adaptations of Out of Africa and “Babette’s Feast” brought her to an enormous new audience. She died at Rungstedlund on 7 September 1962, weighing less than eighty pounds. Her grave is on the estate grounds, under a great beech tree.
Collecting Blixen/Dinesen
Seven Gothic Tales (1934, Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, New York) was published first in English, making the American edition the true first. Copies in the red-and-gold dust jacket bring $500–$2,000.
Out of Africa (1937, Putnam UK / Random House US) is the most collected title. UK first editions: $300–$1,000. US firsts: $200–$600.
The Danish first editions (published by Gyldendal) are separately collected. Syv fantastiske Fortaellinger (1935) is scarce and valued by Danish collectors.
Signed Blixen material is uncommon — she was reclusive and ill for much of her later life. Inscribed copies are rare and command significant premiums.