Karen Blixen, the Danish author whose pen name was Isak Dinesen, was a unique woman. She was independent and wed a friend she didn't love as a marriage of convenience to begin a new life. She was highly intelligent and a born storyteller who could ad lib a fascinating tale if given the first sentence. She lived at the end of a great era in East Africa, which at the time was a kind of Eden. The love of her life was Dennis Finch-Hatton, a hunter, pilot and adventurer who refused to make a comittment to her. A protege was Beryl Markham, an aviatrix who flew the Atlantic ocean alone in 1929 and wrote an excellent book about it ("West With The Night.")
Blixen's best work was the autobiographical "Out of Africa," a beautiful mixture of philosophical reflections and poetic/realistic impressions of her life as a coffee farm pioneer in early 20th century Kenya. I had never heard of the book until the 1960s when I read a short story by J. D. Salinger in which it was touted as a classic. However, I forgot about "Out of Africa" until the film version with Meryl Streep was released in 1985. Then I finally read the book and found it even better than the movie. I recall being strangely moved by a remark from a native worker after a dam collapsed on Blixen's farm: "This water lives in Mombasa." How quaint, I mused, to think of water as a living thing that had a home.
Blixen developed a strong personal bond with the tribal people who lived on her farm and taught her how to see Africa through their eyes. Finch-Hatton often took Blixen on hunting safaris to show her wilderness nature in the raw.
When he died in a plane crash, she observed sadly that "the world was made round so we can't see too far down the road."
After 18 years, Blixen deeded her farm to her native workers and returned to Denmark. She never saw Africa again, though she continued to write about it as the special place she remembered fondly.
In 1954 when Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he said he thought it should have been awarded to Isak Dinesen. It was quite a compliment from a writer who was known for disliking women authors.
Blixen lived a solitary life until she was 77 and she visited the U.S. a few years before her death in 1962.
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