Karen Blixen died 54 years ago due to a long-term disease her husband passed on to her and that diminished her strength in the final period of her life. Syphilis had already marked Blixen’s life, when with only 10 years old her father, to whom she was really close, killed himself due to this disease. Nowadays, she is buried in her home town, Denmark; away from Africa, the continent that inspired her most famous novel, “Out of Africa”.
7 september 2016
In this post we want to pay a tribute to this prodigious novelist who was nominated twice to the Nobel Prize Award. During 1914, the young writer born in 1885, coming from a wealthy family, got married with her cousin, the baron Bror Blixen in Mombasa and settled in Nairobi, where together with her husband, she acquired a property called Mbagathi. According to La Vanguardia, “her integration in the continent was immediate and the identification with the native people was almost instant”.
Nevertheless, soon after she had to get back to her home town to get a treatment for syphilis. During this recovery period she decides to retake her passion for painting and writing. Nevertheless, she didn’t stay much time and in 1916 she got back to Africa, where with the help of her family, she created a farm called “Karen Coffee Company”. Soon after her come back, she met Denys Finch Hatton, an English military pilot who became her lover. Later, she replaced her husband in the management of the farm and then got divorced.
During this recovery period she decides to retake her passion for painting and writing
But the worst happen in 1931 when Finch died in a bad accident. This man had had a great influence, both intellectually and sentimentally in Blixen. His figure was essential for the personal and artistic development of the writer, so the loss destroyed her. Also, soon after the farm started to go bankrupt, she was forced to leave Africa again.
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that during this period of her life she got the chance of learning and share knowledge, until that thanks to her great communicative skills she got to make the Africa her home. The time Karen spent in Africa was decisive for the history of that country, and her testimony and experiences are key to understand the dramatic transition she lived in that region during the Victorian period and later. We always think that that is just fiction, but they are memories that reflect an epoch gathered in a globally known work that made Kenia visible in the political map.
Thanks to her great communicative skills she got to make the Africa her home
During the last years she spent in the farm, she got to finish some of her tales and during World War II in Denmark she continued writing. Thus, many of her other works were also very important. Encouraged by the success she got first in America and after in England with her novel: “Seven Gothic Tales”, Karen Blixen, despite her bad condition, continued working in new works and projects. To this book followed “Out of Africa” and “Winter’s Tale”.
Fifteen years passed until she published again another book of certain importance, but in 1944 she published the thriller “The Angelic Avengers” under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel, and in 1952 “Babette’s Feast” and “The Cardinal’s First Tale”. Only a year after her death, it was published “her posthumous narrative “Ehrengard", considered a master piece of the 20th century in the tales genre”, such as La Vanguardia publishes. Some people state that she gave a new meaning to the world and literature as a place where searching, exploring and living.
