Mention the name Isak Dinesen and people respond with: she wrote Out of Africa which, of course she did.  But her works that I love best are her collections of short Fiction, most especially Seven Gothic Tales, Last Tales and Winter Tales.  Her stories are complex and describe characters with ambiguous sexuality – no porn – just a lot of uncertainty.  Her quotes are apt and her winding plots include stories within stories.

The following text contains excerpts from her site on the internet.

INFORMATION SITE

 

 

LINKS || YOUR QUESTIONS ||  HER LIFE BY DATES ||  THE STORY OF HER LIFE  || MORE ABOUT HER LIFE || BOOKS SHE WROTE || BOOKS ABOUT HER ||  THE AFRICA HOUSE  || HER MEDICAL HISTORY|| OUT OF ISAK DINESEN, BIOGRAPHY || OUT OF AFRICA MOVIE || MOVIE POEMS || DENYS FINCH HATTON || SEVEN GOTHIC TALES || BABETTE’S FEAST ||  FAMOUS MISTAKES || SPECIAL RESOURCES ||LINKS

Photo © Michael Steeves

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 several times 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

 

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.
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 five years of that time in her beloved Denmark. She left Kenya in 1931 and never returned.


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. 


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 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.

—copyright © 2008 by Linda Donelson

 

Book Reviews, Books of note, Memoirs

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April 11, 2012

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