Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
OUT OF RUNGSTED
Karen Blixen (1885-1962) was born in Rungsted, a well-to-do community north of Copen-
hagen, as Karen Christenze Dinesen. Throughout her life, this unusual woman created an
aura of eccentricity around herself, trying on different names, fictionalising her own life,
and causing controversy with her 'decadent' writings.
In 1914, aged 28 and eager to escape the confines of her bourgeois family, she married
her second cousin Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after having a failed love affair with his
twin brother Hans. It was a marriage of convenience - she wanted his title and he needed
her money.
The couple moved to Kenya and started a coffee plantation, which Karen was left to
manage. It was here that she was diagnosed with syphilis, contracted from the woman-
ising baron (although it's possible that her ill health was caused by arsenic poisoning,
taken as medicine for the syphilis she feared she had). The diagnosis was especially dam-
aging psychologically since her father had committed suicide after contracting syphilis
when Karen was 10 years old. Blixen came home to Denmark for medical treatment, then
returned to Africa and divorced the baron in 1925.
She then lived with the great love of her life, Englishman Denys Finch-Hatton, for six
years, until he died in a tragic plane crash in 1932. The couple were played by Meryl
Streep and Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning film adaptation of Out of Africa,Blixen's
autobiography. Soon after his death Blixen left Africa, returning to the family estate in
Rungsted where she began to write. Denmark was slow to appreciate her, in part because
she used an old-fashioned idiomatic style, wrote approvingly about the aristocracy and
insisted on being addressed as 'Baroness' in a country bent on minimising class disparity.
Blixen's first book of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales,was published in New York in
1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. It was only after the topic became immensely
successful in the USA that Danish publishers took a serious interest.
After the commercial success of Out of Africain both Danish and English, other books
followed: Winter's Tales(1942), The Angelic Avengers(1946), Last Tales(1957), Anec-
dotes of Destiny(1958) and Shadows on the Grass(1960). Another Oscar-winning film,
Babette's Feast,was based on her story about culinary artistry in small-town Denmark.
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