Know your author: Von Blixen-Finecke

She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French, and English. She as also noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.
Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as “a mistake” that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s. She never did win, though she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andriae was awarded the prize.
Karen Dinesen was raised in a middle class family, her father Wilhelm was a writer and army office and her mother came from a wealthy Unitarian bourgeois merchant family. She began publishing fiction in Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of the Seminole leader, possibly inspired by her father’s connection with Native Americans.
In 1913 Karen Dinesen became engaged to her second-cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after a failed love affair with his brother. The couple moved to Kenya, where in early 1914 they used family money to establish a coffee plantation, hiring African workers, predominantly the Kikuyu who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival.
About the couple’s early life in Africa, Karen Blixen later wrote, “here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams”.
The two were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. She was diagnosed with syphilis towards the end of their first year of marriage, which, although eventually cured (some uncertainty exists), created medical anguish for years afterward. The Blixens separated in 1921, and were divorced in 1925. After a series of misfortunes in her life forced Blixen to abandon her beloved coffee plantation. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned to Denmark, where she lived for the rest of her life.
On returning to Denmark, Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the United States in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. This first book, highly enigmatic and more metaphoric than Gothic, won great recognition, and publication of the book in Great Britain and Denmark followed.
Her second book, now the best known of her works, was Out of Africa, published in 1937 and its success firmly established her reputation as an author. She was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat (a Danish prize for women in the arts or academic life) in 1939. During World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Germans, Blixen started her only full-length novel, the introspective tale The Angelic Avengers, under another pseudonym, Pierre Andrezel; it was published in 1944. The horrors experienced by the young heroines were interpreted as an allegory of Nazism. Her writing during most of the 1940s and 1950s consisted of tales in the storytelling tradition.
The most famous is “Babette’s Feast”, about a chef who spends her entire 10 000 franc lottery prize to prepare a final, spectacular gourmet meal. The Immortal Story, in which an elderly man tries to buy youth, was adapted to the screen in 1968 by Orson Welles, a great admirer of Blixen’s work and life. Welles later attempted to film The Dreamers, but only a few scenes were ever completed.
Blixen’s tales follow a traditional style of storytelling, and most take place against the background of the 19th century or earlier periods. Concerning her deliberately old-fashioned style, Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, that of destiny and courage.
Indeed, many of her ideas can be traced back to those of Romanticism. Blixen’s concept of the art of the story is perhaps most directly expressed in the story “The Cardinal’s First Tale” from her fifth book, Last Tales. Though Danish, Blixen wrote her books in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Critics describe her English as having unusual beauty.
Her later books usually appeared simultaneously in both Danish and English. As an author, she kept her public image as a charismatic, mysterious old Baroness with an insightful third eye, and established herself as an inspiring figure in Danish culture, although shunning the mainstream. Although it was widely believed that syphilis continued to plague Blixen throughout her lifetime, extensive tests were unable to reveal evidence of syphilis in her system after 1925.
Unable to eat, Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family’s estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition. The source of her abdominal problems remains unknown, although gastric syphilis, manifested by gastric ulcers during secondary and tertiary syphilis, was well-known prior to the advent of modern antibiotics. — wikipedia