Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke (born Dinesen; 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962) 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 (1942), Last Tales (1957), Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) and Ehrengard (1963). 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.
Karen Christentze Dinesen was born on 17 April 1885 in Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen (1845–1895), was a writer, army officer, and politician. He served in the Second Schleswig War between Denmark and 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 (1856–1939), 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 (Letters from the Hunt), became a minor classic in Danish literature.
While in his mid-20s, her father lived among the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin (August 1872 to December 1873), 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 (1859–1935), who had made a fortune in Siam, suggested they should go to Kenya to start a coffee farm. He and his sister Ingeborg (Karen's mother) 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.
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 of Kenya.
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 6,000 acres (2,400 ha) of land: 600 acres (240 ha) were used for a coffee plantation, 3,400 acres (1,400 ha) were used by the natives for grazing, and 2,000 acres (810 ha) 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."