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
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.
In 1938,
when a very different book, Out of Africa,
was published by
the same author, the reading public was tantalized to learn that Isak
Dinesen was a Danish baroness, whose real name was Karen Blixen.
Americans had long been fascinated with aristocracy, and wealthy young
Americans--Cornelia Vanderbilt and Nancy Astor, among others--often
married into titled European families.
The prose in Out
of Africa displayed an entirely different kind of
writing from Isak Dinesen's first book. Out of Africa
looked back with
nostalgia upon her life as a settler on a coffee plantation in Kenya.
It presented a lyrical depiction of life on a colonial farm, with
deaths,
drought, and disappointments--as well as great and tragic friendships.
Isak
Dinesen was among the first authors to describe Africans as
individuals rather than as stereotypes. She has been criticized for
participating in the colonial intrusion into Africa, and also for
making poetic comparisons of various personalities--both Kenyans and
white settlers--to birds and animals. She has often been labeled racist
for her frank depiction of the power differences between Whites and
Blacks in early twentieth century Africa.
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?