Biography of Karen Blixen

The Lady coming from the cold

17 April 1885 7 September 1962 Karen Blixen, whose real name was Karen Christence Dinesen, was born on 17 April 1885 in Rungstedlund, Denmark. Daughter of a landowner addicted to politics (then committed suicide) lived for a long time in the country that his father first bought and later restored it at his own expense. In addition to the placid routine of the Danish countryside Karen knew, at least for the first part of his life, the comforts, the gossip and the softness of the environments "upperclass" modern nearby and Copenhagen. In 1913 gets engaged to the Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and together they decided to go to Africa with the idea to buy a farm. "Civil" life didn't seem suited to the rebellious character and maybe a little romance of the future writer. In the lounges is bored deeply, almost feeling that life escapes in his hands without trying real emotions and real. The epilogue pink of this sort of escape, although not really such characters (at least in the eyes of the people who surround the two) consists of the marriage that formalizes as husband and wife, celebrated in Mombasa in 1914. When combined and in good standing with the law, by mutual agreement will move to a large plantation near Nairobi. Unfortunately the initial romance falls apart after a few years. What looked like a great love story with common interests and passions is revealed in reality a prison hard to bear. The 1921 is the year of painful divorce. Bror leaves Africa while Karen lives on in the coffee plantation, now his reason for living, making it grow and conducting with intelligence and tenacity for seventeen years. But even this laborious routine will terminate. The sudden crisis occurs in 1931 when the coffee market collapses and Karen Blixen is forced to close the plantation activity after several years of stunted survival. At this point more than sentimental reasons the force you to leave Africa and returning to the family home, where he devoted himself intensely to writing. Among the many stories he writes one in particular is meant to evoke his years in Africa. This kind of intimate diary, considered his masterpiece, is none other than the famous "out of Africa", a title that will come out only in 1937. The first publication that sees market's "Seven gothic tales," published in England and America in 1934. Despite the searing longing for Kenya, nostalgia that has all the characters of a true "mal d'africa", she will spend the rest of his life in Denmark, though plagued by a poor health and vacillating, perhaps attributable according to some reconstructions for a venereal disease poorly treated that would contract by her husband during the first year of marriage. The last few years so I am particularly sad and delicate. Undermined by unrelenting disease that doesn't leave a moment's respite, spends long periods in hospital, sometimes unable even to write or to assume a sitting position. To give shape to his creativity relies on careful trascrittirce of his faithful Secretary, confessor and feeble dictations. The end comes on September 7, 1962 when Karen Blixen has just passed the seventy-seven. A peculiarity of this author is that throughout his career he loved lurk behind many pseudonyms: Isak Dinesen to Tania Blixen until androgynous masking with publications on behalf of Pierre Andrézel. This strange and somewhat incomprehensible attitude drew upon her a large number of gossip, even regarding the originality of his writings. The fact remains that Hemingway, upon delivery of the Nobel Prize, hinted that this award should have been even assigned to the great lady coming from the North.

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