Karen Blixen

Karen Dinesen was born in 1885 at Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen; her father killed himself when she was ten. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, then left for British East Africa, where in 1914 she married at Mombasa her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who gave her syphilis. She ran a coffee plantation for seventeen years at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The failure of the estate, sold in 1931, and the death of Denys Finch Hatton brought her back to Denmark, where she wrote in English and in Danish. She died at Rungstedlund in 1962.

In the catalogue 1

• Short storiesBabette's FeastKaren Blixen · 1950Literature