Karen Blixen

Karen Blixen, born Karen Christentze Dinesen on 17 April 1885, was a Danish writer who published in both Danish and English. She used several pen names: Isak Dinesen in English-speaking countries, Tania Blixen in German-speaking ones, as well as Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Her most famous works are *Out of Africa*, a memoir of her time in Kenya, and the short story "Babette's Feast." Both were turned into films that each won an Academy Award. She is also well known, especially in Denmark and the United States, for her collection *Seven Gothic Tales*. Later story collections include *Winter's Tales* (1942), *Last Tales* (1957), *Anecdotes of Destiny* (1958), and *Ehrengard* (1963), the last of which was adapted into a 2023 romantic comedy film. Blixen was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never won; Danish reports attribute this to judges’ concerns about appearing to favor Scandinavian writers.

Blixen was born at Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, on 17 April 1885. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, was a writer, army officer, and politician who fought in the Second Schleswig War and later with the French army against Prussia, writing about the Paris Commune. He came from a wealthy landowning family tied to the monarchy, church, and conservative politics, and served as a Member of Parliament. Her mother, Ingeborg Westenholz, came from a wealthy Unitarian merchant family of ship owners. Karen was the second oldest of five siblings; her younger brother Thomas Dinesen served in World War I and received the Victoria Cross. Friends called her "Tanne."

Her early years were shaped by her father’s relaxed manner and love of the outdoors and hunting. He wrote throughout his life, and his memoir *Boganis Jagtbreve* (Letters from the Hunt) became a minor Danish classic. In his mid-20s, he lived among the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin from August 1872 to December 1873, fathering a daughter there. After returning to Denmark, he contracted syphilis, which caused deep depression. He also fathered a child out of wedlock with a maid, Anna Rasmussen, breaking a promise to his mother-in-law to remain faithful. He hanged himself on 28 March 1895, when Karen was nine.

After her father’s death, life at Rungstedlund changed. From age ten, her mother’s Westenholz family dominated her upbringing. Unlike her brothers, who attended school, she was educated at home by her maternal grandmother and aunt, Mary B. Westenholz, in a strict Unitarian tradition. Her Aunt Bess had a strong influence, engaging her in discussions and correspondence about women’s rights and relationships between men and women. She spent part of her early years at her mother’s family farm, Mattrup, near Horsens, and later visited Folehavegård, an estate near Hørsholm that belonged to her father’s family. Longing for the freedom she had with her father, she found some outlet in telling her younger sister Ellen hair-raising good-night stories inspired by Danish folk tales and Icelandic sagas. In 1905, this led to *Grjotgard Ålvesøn og Aud*, where her literary talent first emerged. Around this time, she published fiction in Danish periodicals under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of her father’s dog.

In 1898, she and her two sisters spent a year in Switzerland, where she learned French. In 1902, she attended Charlotte Sode’s art school in Copenhagen, then studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Viggo Johansen from 1903 to 1906. In her mid-twenties, she took study trips to Paris, London, and Rome. She often spent holidays with her paternal cousin’s family, the Blixen-Fineckes, in Skåne, Sweden, and fell in love with her second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke. When he did not return her feelings, she began a relationship with his twin brother, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke. They announced their engagement on 23 December 1912, surprising the family.

Because both struggled to settle in Denmark, the family suggested they move abroad. Her uncle, Aage Westenholz, who had made a fortune in Siam, proposed they start a coffee farm in Kenya. He and her mother invested 150,000 Danish krone. Bror left for Kenya in early 1913, and Karen followed in December 1913.

Soon after arriving in Kenya, then part of British East Africa, she married Bror in Mombasa on 14 January 1914. After marriage, she was known as Baroness Blixen and used the title until her ex-husband remarried in 1929. Bror had studied agriculture at Alnarp and managed the Stjetneholm farm. Karen and Bror initially planned to raise cattle but soon decided coffee would be more profitable. The Karen Coffee Company was established by their uncle, who named it after his own daughter, not after Karen Blixen. They set up their first farm, Mbagathi, in the Great Lakes area of Kenya.