Karen Blixen Biography and List of Works

Danish writer, whose stories incorporate the erotic, supernaturalism and dreams. As a storyteller Blixen draws her inspiration from the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the works of Homer, and the Icelandic sagas. Her tales have inspired such film makers as Orson Welles and Sydney Pollack.

'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?'
The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently.
'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'
(from 'The Cardinal's Fist Tale')

Baroness Karen Blixen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, into a well-to-do patrician family. She was the daughter of Ingeborg Westenholz Dinesen and the writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, whose adventuresome spirit and storytelling talents deeply influenced Blixen's imagination. She spent her childhood on the family estate in Rungsted, and throughout her life Blixen's outlook and manner were unabashedly aristocratic.

At early age, Blixen showed an artistic inclination. She attended the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, and also studied in England, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Blixed made her debut as a writer in 1907 with several short stories.

"I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser..."
(From Anecdotes of Destiny, 1958)

In 1914 she married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and travelled with him to Kenya, where they managed a coffee plantation. They were divorced in 1921. Blixen ran the plantation by herself but in 1931 she returned to Denmark, after fruitless stuggles with mismanagement, drought, and the falling price of coffee. Blixen's years in Kenya are depicted in OUT OF AFRICA (1937) - "I had a farm in Africa..." The book was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1985, directed by Sydney Pollack. Blixen's work is considered by many to be a masterpiece, but it ignores her unhappy marriage, and her affair with the English game pilot Denys Finch-Hatton. Later she returned to her African experiences in the autobiographical SKYGGER PÅ GRÆSET (1960, Shadows on the Grass). Blixen's description of her servants and the indigenous African population is understanding, but a more overtly patrician outlook is revealed in her posthumous LETTERS FROM AFRICA (1981).

Blixen's first major work, the short story collection SEVEN GOTHIC TALES (1934), was proclaimed a masterpiece by critics in England and the Unites States. The elaborate, deliberately unrealistic tales, mostly set in the old aristocratic Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries, combines the themes of love and dreams with elements of fantasy. The opening tale, 'The Deluge at Norderney', is an account of a night passed in a hayloft by four strangers, who tell the story of his or her life, while waiting for rescue. As in several other Blixen's works, the stories meld into other stories. The central theme in the collection is that, only through an understanding of one's true God-given role in life,is one able to reach a lasting inner balance. The Danish edition published in 1935, Syv fantastiske fortællinger, received mixed reviews: the author was accused of elitism.

"What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
(from 'The Dreamers' in Seven Gothic Tales, 1934)

During WW II, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, Blixen started to write her only full-length novel, the introspective GENGÆLDELSENS VEJE (The Angelic Avengers), published in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. In 1942 appeared VINTER-EVENTYR (1942), which refers to Shakespeare's play, but also contains an allusion to the situation of Denmark. ANECDOTES OF DESTINY (1958) contains five tales, of which the most famous is 'Babette's Feast', in which Babette, a famous French chef, changes the lives of the members of an obscure and puritanical religious sect living on a Norwegian fjord. The story was filmed in 1987.

In the 1950s Blixen's health deteriorated, and writing became impossible. However, Blixen appeared as a lecturer on the radio and made one record. Her name was mentioned several times in the context of Nobel Prize awards - Hemingway himself said that the Prize should have been given to Dinesen, not to him. In 1959 she made a lecture tour in the United States, which gained a huge success. Such American writers as Truman Capote and Carson McCullers acknowledged their debt to Blixen.

Though Danish, Blixen wrote in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Her English has unusual beauty and great technical skill. Blixen's later books usually appeared simultaneously in both languages. She died in Rungsted on Septmber 7, 1962.

For further reading: The World of Isak Dinesen by E.O. Johannesson (1961); The Gaiety of Vision by R. Langbaum (1964); Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen by P. Migel (1968); The Life and Destiny of Karen Blixen by C. Svendsen and F. Lasson (1970); Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality by D. Hannah (1971); Isak Dinesen's Aesthetics by T.R. Whissen (1973); My Sister, Isak Dinesen by T. Dinesen (1975); Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by J. Thurman (1982); The Power of Aries: Myth and Reality in Karen Blixen's Life by A. Westenholz (1987); The Witch Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading by S. Stambaugh (1989) - Note: In her late years, Blixen occassionaly dressed as the commedia dell'arte character Pierrot - also her works with multi-voice narrations presenting material in a complex, dancelike pattern, reflects the influence of this theatre tradition from the 16th-century. - Blixen's story Tempest from Anecdotes of Destiny is based on William Shakespeare's play. - See also: Karen Blixen Museet

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES, (1934)
OUT OF AFRICA, (1937)
WINTER'S TALES, (1942)
GENGÆLDELSENS VEJE, (1944)
DAGUERROTYPIER, (1951)
BABETTES GÆSTEBUD, (1952)
KARDINALENS TREDIE HISTORIE, (1952)
EN BÅLTALE, (1953)
SPØ GELSESHESTERNE, (1955)
LAST TALES, (1957)
ANECDOTES OF DESTINY, (1958)
SKYGGER PÅ GRÆSET, (1960)
SANDHEDENS HÆVN, (1960)
OSCEOLA, (1962)
EHRENGARD, (1963)
ESSAYS, (1965)
EFTERLADTE FORTÆLINGER, (1975)
CARNIVAL: ENTERTAINMENTS AND POSTHUMOUS TALES, (1977)
DAGUERREOTYPES, AND OTHER ESSAYS, (1979)
LETTERS FROM AFRICA, (1914)