Isak DinesenBorn: Rungsted, Denmark

April 17, 1885Died: Rungsted, Denmark

September 7, 1962

Mentioned for the Nobel Prize many times, Dinesen was admiredfor her unique short stories and for her brilliant memoir of her lifein Africa.

BiographyBaroness Karen Christenze Blixen-Finecke, who

later used such pen names as Isak Dinesen (DEE-nuh-suhn), Karen Blixen, Pierre Andrezel, andTania B., was born in a house by the sea inRungsted, Denmark, on April 17, 1885. The housein which she was born had once been occupied byJohannes Ewald, the man usually considered to beDenmark’s finest poet. When she was only ten yearsold, her father hanged himself, a tragic event thatmarked the rest of her life and profoundly affectedthe tone of her stories.

Dinesen had no formal schooling as a child butdid attend a private school in France during herteen years. In 1903, she entered the Royal Academyof Fine Arts in Copenhagen to study painting, butfor the next seven years she also devoted herself towriting—and to a painful relationship with HansBlixen-Finecke. In 1910, she left Denmark, intend-ing to study art in Paris, but she abruptly returnedhome and continued her writing. Profoundly de-pressed by the various setbacks and apparent lackof direction in her life, she took a brief vacation tripto Rome. On returning, she became engaged toBaron Bror Blixen-Finecke, the twin brother of herformer lover. In 1914. she followed Bror to Kenya,and they were married in the capital city of Nairobi.

The marriage with Bror Blixen was rocky at best.From him she contracted syphilis, which renderedher sterile and contributed to the progressive dete-

rioration of her health over the rest of her life. BrorBlixen was a famous sportsman and notoriouswomanizer who mismanaged the coffee plantationhe had bought with money provided by Dinesen’sfamily. They divorced in 1921, and she took controlof the plantation, which became known as the Ka-ren Coffee Company.

Unpredictable weather and fluctuations in theworld price of coffee impelled the Karen CoffeeCompany’s decline with each succeeding year ofthe decade of the 1920’s. The company was pulledinexorably downward by the stock market crash of1929. The one bright spot in Dinesen’s life duringthese dark years was the profoundly joyful associa-tion she had with Denys Finch Hatton, a big-gamehunter and lover of the arts. He encouraged her tocontinue her writing and storytelling and sharedhis love for the flora and fauna of the East Africanplateau with her.

Denys Finch Hatton was also an aviator; Dinesenflew with him over wild, beautiful, and inaccessiblecountry. Without the influence of this special man,who became her lover and her mentor, much ofDinesen’s work might never have been produced.In 1931, Hatton died when his plane crashed, herbankrupt farm was sold off by auctioneers, and sheleft her beloved Africa, never to return.

Dinesen settled down in Rungstedlund, herfamily estate near Rungsted, Denmark, where shefinished writing—in English—a book she had be-gun in Africa, Seven Gothic Tales (1934). The workbecame a great success, as did four more of her ti-tles. During this time Dinesen’s health began to de-cline, but she continued to write, her career having

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been launched by the success of Seven Gothic Tales.Her next work, her most famous, is a memoir of heryears on the coffee plantation outside Nairobi. Denafrikanske Farm (1937; Out of Africa, 1937) is one ofher most enduring books: She wrote it in Englishand Danish.

World War II and a clinical diagnosis of tertiarysyphilis did not keep Dinesen from continuing towrite. In 1942, she completed another set of her re-markable stories, Vinter-Eventyr (Winter’s Tales,1942), also published in Danish and English. Be-tween 1942 and 1957, Dinesen was plagued byworsening health. Consequently, she wrote lessand less, communicating with her reading publicthrough interviews and radio broadcasts. An in-valid after several operations in 1955, she pub-lished one more book of her stories in two lan-guages, Sidste Fortœllinger (Last Tales, 1957), in 1957.

She summoned the energy for a widely publi-cized visit to New York City in 1959, an event docu-mented by famous photographers and painters. In1960, she published Skygger paa Grœsset (Shadows onthe Grass, 1960) a brilliant reprise of her earlier Afri-can theme. Her body was wasting away even as thebook appeared, and Dinesen died on September 7,1962. She was buried on the grounds of her familyestate.

AnalysisIn 1985, most young Americans had never

heard of Dinesen, but then her longest and mostfamous work, Out of Africa, appeared on the silverscreen, with Meryl Streep playing Isak and RobertRedford in the role of Denys Finch Hatton, herfriend, lover, and artistic mentor. The screenplayis actually an amalgam of various texts aboutDinesen’s African experience. Drawing on biogra-phies, letters, and other sources, the screenplayevokes the evolutionary process by which Dinesenbecame an artist and no longer a coffee plantationmanager. In one memorable scene in the film, Isakresponds to suggestions by Denys and his friendBerkeley Cole that she tell them a story. They pro-vide the first line, and she invents, as she speaks, acomplicated, magical tale.

That scene encapsulates the artistic method ofDinesen, who was a dreamer and inventor of fic-tions for her entire career. Even her remem-brances of Africa are imbued with the sense of won-der and otherworldliness that characterize her

fiction. There is an air of fantasy and fairy tale in ev-erything that Dinesen wrote. She composed storiesfrom the deep reservoirs of her imagination andher nightmares; she was never a strict realist or ajournalist. Reality, for her, remained an internal-ized affair; how she remembered was always moreimportant than what she remembered. It was thesense of a thing that counted most with her. Inother days she may have been called a teller of tales,a carrier of legends and ancient wisdom. Dinesencalled herself a storyteller, not a writer. Her job, sheinsisted, was “to create another sort of reality.”

Dinesen may be classified as a romantic writer inthe sense that she favors powerfully emotional andexotic stories, often filled with inexplicable or irra-tional events. Her emphasis is always on a fewclosely analyzed characters, never on society as awhole. Her world is filled with strong, often uncon-trollable, forces. Readers who are familiar with thetales of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Haw-thorne, with their moody atmospheres and eccen-tric characters, will encounter many of the same el-ements in the fables of Isak Dinesen.

“The Poet,” for example, is the strange tale thatconcludes Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales. There is vir-tually no plot in the story. An old businessman be-friends and encourages a young poet in a remotebut beautiful Danish village where they both fall inlove with a young widow, who is a former dancer. Al-though she is in love with the poet, the youngwoman agrees to marry the old man. In the finalscene, the poet, drunk and desperate, shoots theold man. The woman finds the old man andsmashes a rock over his head. In the final pages ofthe story, one of the most beautiful passages everwritten by Dinesen, the old man relives all thebeautiful moments of his life: poetry, the smell ofgrass, the beautiful light of the stars. The juxtaposi-tion of unexpected violence and pure beautymakes a powerful and unforgettable impression onthe reader. Like all of Dinesen’s best tales, “ThePoet” represents a tragic but mystical view of life, inwhich the terrifying and the edifying tend to hap-pen side by side. There is never any cheap irony orperfunctory reversals in Dinesen’s stories, as onemay find in the short stories of O. Henry or Guy deMaupassant. Dinesen presents the reader with auniverse that is whole, inscrutable, and thrilling.

Dinesen’s love of magic, mystery, and artisticcreation owes much to the milieu of her upbring-

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ing. She was a member of the last genteel genera-tion of Europeans whose cultural lives were formedbefore the outbreak of World War I. Dinesen wasfirst and last an aesthete, a lover of beauty forbeauty’s sake. She was well traveled and multilin-gual. She had also been trained as a painter; in-deed, she saw the world in terms of tints and color-ations rather than plots and causation. For all itsapparent objectivity, Out of Africa is a brilliantly sub-jective work, communicating her elation and aweat the sight of people, animals, and places. In allher African writings one finds very few objective de-scriptions of these people and things, but there aremany notations of her reactions to them.

A continuous thread runs through Dinesen’sworks. Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, and Winter’sTales all emphasize exotic characters and thethemes of art and violence. In Shadows on the GrassDinesen returns to these themes and, as she did inOut of Africa, becomes a character in her own storyabout Africa.

It would be wrong to conclude, however, thatDinesen distorted the details of her experiences orthat she invented fictional characters not reflectiveof her feelings. Isak Dinesen lived the life of an au-thentic artist, a life in which the real and the imag-ined could coexist. In this she found the substanceof her art.

Out of AfricaFirst published: Den afrikanske Farm, 1937Type of work: Memoir

A young woman goes to Africa, runs a coffeeplantation, falls in love, and collects indeliblememories.

Out of Africa partakes of history, autobiography,and pastoral romance. It is a highly personal ac-count of a period in the author’s life (roughly 1913to 1931). Unlike authors of many memoirs or auto-biographies, Dinesen is largely uninterested infacts, figures, dates, historical background, or poli-tics. World War I and the Great Depression occurwithin the time frame of this book, but there is littledirect mention of them although Dinesen occa-sionally discusses their effect on people’s lives. Al-

though she spent nearly twenty years in Africa andknew hundreds of people, only a dozen or sonames emerge in the narrative. The narrative itselftends to be a rather casual affair, for Dinesen tendsto tell her story in episodes, rather than in lengthysequences. Some episodes clearly overlap, like theaccidental shooting of an African child, the subse-quent trial, and the appearance of Chief Kinanjui,a Kikuyu tribesman, whose death is described insome detail later. The exact sequence and linkageof these events remainsunclear, or rather unim-portant from Dinesen’spoint of view.

What does matter toDinesen is the large tap-estry of events; in fact,she uses the word “tapes-try” many times to de-scribe the dappled colorsof greenery and sunlightunder the canopy of theAfrican forest. In short,she sees this African in-terlude with the eyes of apainter; characters and events tend to be groupedinto episodes or pictorial clusters. The reader goesfrom one cluster to another, in the manner of atourist looking at a huge tapestry, inspecting oneportion at a time.

One may simplify Out of Africa into three largeclusters, the first being the coffee farm, its nativeinhabitants, and servants. In this cluster belongFarah, Dinesen’s overseer and general manager,the Danish jack-of-all-trades Old Knudsen, and thebeautiful blue Ngong Hills that border her prop-erty. She omits most of the technical details aboutgrowing and harvesting coffee beans.

Another distinct cluster belongs to Lulu, thewild female bushbuck that Dinesen tamed. She de-votes many pages to the habits and appearance ofthis lovely creature. Despite her nearness to twolarge game reserves, Dinesen does not generallydescribe other wild creatures, with the exceptionof giraffes and lions. The lions actually belong tothe third cluster, which is presided over by DenysFinch Hatton and his friend Berkeley Cole (whodies shortly before Hatton’s plane crash). In theend, lions come to sleep over Hatton’s grave, pro-viding one of the most moving and poignant pas-

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