Karen Blixen
Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author who wrote in Danish and English. She is also known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries; Tania Blixen, used in German-speaking countries; Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.
Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while in Kenya, and for one of her stories, "Babette's Feast". Both have been adapted as films and each won Academy Awards. She is also noted, particularly in Denmark and the United States, for her Seven Gothic Tales. Among her later story collections are Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. The latter was adapted to film in 2023 as the romantic comedy Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction.
Blixen was considered several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but failed to win, according to Danish reports, because of the judges' concern with perceptions of favoritism towards Scandinavian writers.
Biography
Early life and education
Karen Christentze Dinesen was born on 17 April 1885 in Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, was a writer, army officer, and politician. He served in the Second Schleswig War by Denmark against Prussia, and also joined the French army against Prussia. He later wrote about the Paris Commune. He was from a wealthy family of Jutland landowners closely connected to the monarchy, the established church and conservative politics. He was elected as Member of Parliament.Her mother, Ingeborg Westenholz, came from a wealthy Unitarian bourgeois merchant family of ship owners. Karen Dinesen was the second oldest in a family of three sisters and two brothers. Her younger brother, Thomas Dinesen, served in the First World War and earned the Victoria Cross. Karen was known to her friends as "Tanne".
Dinesen's early years were strongly influenced by her father's relaxed manner and his love of the outdoor life and hunting. He wrote throughout his life and his memoir, Boganis Jagtbreve became a minor classic in Danish literature.
While in his mid-20s, her father lived among the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin, and fathered a daughter.
On returning to Denmark, he suffered from syphilis which resulted in bouts of deep depression. He conceived a child out of wedlock with his maid Anna Rasmussen, and was devastated because he had promised his mother-in-law to remain faithful to his wife. He hanged himself on 28 March 1895 when Karen was nine years old.
Karen Dinesen'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. They brought her up in the staunch Unitarian tradition. Her Aunt Bess had significant influence on Dinesen. They engaged in lively discussions and correspondence on women's rights and relationships between men and women.
During her early years, she spent part of her time at her mother's family home, the Mattrup seat farm near Horsens. In later years she visited Folehavegård, an estate near Hørsholm that had belonged to her father's family. Longing for the freedom she had enjoyed when her father was alive, she found some satisfaction in telling her younger sister Ellen hair-raising good-night stories, partly inspired by Danish folk tales and Icelandic sagas. In 1905, these led to her Grjotgard Ålvesøn og Aud, in which her literary talent began to emerge. Around this time, she also published fiction in Danish periodicals under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of her father's dog, which she had often walked in her father's company.
In 1898, Dinesen and her two sisters spent a year in Switzerland, where she learned to speak French. In 1902, she attended Charlotte Sode's art school in Copenhagen before continuing her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Viggo Johansen from 1903 to 1906. In her mid-twenties, she also visited Paris, London and Rome on study trips.
Dinesen spent many of her holidays with her paternal cousin's family, the Blixen-Fineckes, in Skåne in the south of Sweden and fell in love with her second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke. When Hans did not reciprocate, she entered a relationship with his twin brother, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke. The couple announced their engagement on 23 December 1912, to the family's surprise.
Given the difficulties both were experiencing in settling in Denmark, the family suggested they should move abroad. Karen's uncle, Aage Westenholz who had made a fortune in Siam, suggested they should go to Kenya to start a coffee farm. He and his sister Ingeborg invested 150,000 Danish krone in the venture. Early in 1913, Bror left for Kenya. He was followed by his fiancée Karen in December 1913.
Life in Kenya, 1913–1931
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. During her early years, Karen spent part of her time at her mother's family home, the Mattrup seat farm near Horsens. Karen and Bror planned to raise cattle on their farm, but eventually they became convinced that coffee would be more profitable. The Karen Coffee Company was established by their uncle, Aage Westerholz, who chose the name after his daughter Karen, Blixen's cousin, rather than to create an association with Karen Blixen. The couple soon established their first farm, Mbagathi, in the Great Lakes area.During First World War fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa, Bror served in Lord Delamere's patrols along Kenya's border with German Tanganyika and Karen helped transport supplies. The war led to a shortage of workers and supplies. Nevertheless, in 1916, the Karen Coffee Company purchased a larger farm, Mbogani, near the Ngong Hills to the south–west of Nairobi. The property covered of land: were used for a coffee plantation, were used by the natives for grazing, and of virgin forest were left untouched.
The land was not well-suited for coffee cultivation, given its high elevation. The couple hired local workers: most were Kikuyu who lived on the farmlands at the time of the couple's arrival, but there were also Wakamba, Kavirondo, Swahili, and Masai. Initially, Bror worked the farm, but it soon became evident that he had little interest in it and preferred to leave running the farm to Karen while he went on safari. For the first time, English became the language she used daily. About the couple's early life in the African Great Lakes region, Karen 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!
Karen and her husband were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife.
According to Peter Capstick, "It was not long after Blixen and his wife settled on their farm that he started womanizing." Capstick goes on to say, "His forays into town and his often wild socializing at the Muthaiga Club, coupled with a legendary indiscipline when it came to money and honoring his debts, soon gave the charming Swede a notorious reputation."
As a consequence, she was diagnosed with syphilis according to her biographer Judith Thurman. She herself attributed her symptoms, in a letter to her brother Thomas, to syphilis acquired at 29 years old from her husband toward the end of their first year of marriage in 1915. However, although there is no doubt that she had the disease, it is believed that some of the symptoms she suffered late in life and attributed to syphilis had other causes. While in Africa she had been prescribed mercury and arsenic as treatment for syphilis and it is now believed that some of her later symptoms were the result of heavy metal poisoning.
At her farm, she also used to take care of local sick persons, including those suffering from fever, variola, meningitis and typhus.
She returned to Denmark in June 1915 for treatment with the newly discovered antibiotic Salvarsan which proved helpful. Although Karen's illness may have eventually been cured or alleviated, it created medical anguish for years to come.
On 5 April 1918, Bror and Karen were introduced at the Muthaiga Club to
the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. Soon afterwards he was assigned to military service in Egypt.
By 1919, the marriage had run into difficulties, causing her husband to request a divorce in 1920. Bror was dismissed as the farm manager by their uncle, Aage Westenholz, chair of the Karen Coffee Company, and Karen took over its management in 1921.
On his return to Kenya after the Armistice, Finch Hatton developed a close friendship with Karen and Bror. He left Africa again in 1920.
Against her wishes, Bror and Karen separated in 1921.
Finch Hatton often travelled back and forth between Africa and England, and visited Karen occasionally. He returned in 1922, investing in a land development company. After her separation from her husband, she and Finch Hatton had developed a close friendship, which eventually became a long-term love affair. In a letter to her brother Thomas in 1924, she wrote: "I believe that for all time and eternity I am bound to Denys, to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves..." But other letters in her collections show that the relationship was unstable, and that Karen's increasing dependence upon Finch Hatton, who was intensely independent, was an issue.
Karen and Bror were officially divorced in 1925. Karen would go to Government House where she had befriended Joan Grigg, a nurse and the wife of Baron Edward Grigg, the installed Governor. Grigg would in time create a charity to create hospitals in Kenya.
Finch Hatton moved into her house, made Karen's farmhouse his home base between 1926 and 1931 and began leading safaris for wealthy sportsmen. Among his clients was Edward, Prince of Wales. On safari with his clients, he died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in March 1931.
She wrote about their last meeting and subsequent parting.
"When he had started in his car for the aerodrome in Nairobi, and had turned down the drive, he came back to look for a volume of poems, that he had given to me and now wanted on his journey. He stood with one foot on the running-board of the car, and a finger in the book, reading out to me a poem we had been discussing.
'Here are your grey geese,' he said.
Wild geese vibrant in the high air –
Unswerving from horizon to horizon
With their soul stiffened out in their throats –
And the grey whiteness of them ribboning the enormous skies
And the spokes of the sun over the crumpled hills.
Then he drove away for good, waving his arm to me."
At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, as a result of mismanagement, the high elevation of the farm, drought and the falling price of coffee caused by the worldwide economic depression, forced Karen to abandon her estate. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Karen returned to Denmark in August 1931 to live with her mother. In the Second World War, she helped Jews escape out of German-occupied Denmark. She remained in Rungstedlund for the rest of her life.