Background
Isak Dinesen was born in the manor house of Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, on April 17, 1885, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, adventurer, and author.
(If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is t...)
If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenya and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they derive their themes and locales from Isak Dinesen's childhood in Denmark. Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.
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(In the classic Babettes Feast, a mysterious Frenchwoma...)
In the classic Babettes Feast, a mysterious Frenchwoman prepares sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In The Immortal Story, a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella Ehrengard, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and rakish artist. Hauntingly evoked and sensuously realized, the five stories read and novella collected here and have the hold of fairy stories read in childhood . . . of dreams . . . and of our life as dreams. (The New York Times)
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(Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in ...)
Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.
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(Seven gothic tales from Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Af...)
Seven gothic tales from Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa. The felicity of writing, the charm and dramatic power of these tales, their dignity and beauty, create a spell for readers of every shade of interest. The Deluge at Norderney, The Old Chevalier, The Monkey, The Roads Round Pisa, The Supper at Elsinore, The Dreamers, and The Poet.
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Isak Dinesen was born in the manor house of Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, on April 17, 1885, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, adventurer, and author.
In 1898, Dinesen and her two sisters spent a year in Switzerland, where she learned to speak French. In 1902, she attended Charlotte Sode's art school in Copenhagen before continuing her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Viggo Johansen from 1903 to 1906. In her mid-twenties, she also visited Paris, London and Rome on study trips.
In 1914 she went to Africa, married, and bought a coffee plantation. After her divorce in 1921 she managed the plantation alone until economic disaster forced her to return to Denmark in 1931, where she lived the rest of her life on the family estate, Rungstedlund, near Copenhagen.
The years in Africa were the happiest of Dinesen's life, for she felt, from the first, that she belonged there. Had she not been forced to leave, she wrote later, she would not have become an author. In the dark days just before leaving, she began to write down some of the stories she had told to her friends among the colonists and natives. She wrote in English, the language she used in Africa. Her books usually appeared simultaneously in America, England, and Denmark, written in English and then rewritten in Danish.
Dinesen's first collection, Seven Gothic Tales, appeared in America in 1934, where it was a literary sensation, immediately popular with both critics and public. The Danish critical reaction was cool. Danish literature was still dominated by naturalism, as it had been for the past 60 years, and her work was a reaction against this sober, realistic fiction of analysis.
Dinesen's second book, Out of Africa (1937), a brilliant recreation of her African years, was a critical and popular success wherever it appeared. Although it has little in common, stylistically and formally, with her stories, it describes the experiences which formed her views about life and art. The third central work in her authorship, Winter's Tales, appeared in 1942.
A characteristic of Dinesen's works is the sense that the reader is listening to a storyteller. She wanted to revive in her "listeners" the primitive love of mystery that she found in her African audience, which she felt was like the audiences that listened to Homer, the Old Testament stories, the Arabian Nights, and the sagas (elements from all of which she skillfully wove into her stories). She attempted to reawaken the sense of myth and, with myth, the sense of man's tragic grandeur, which she felt had been lost.
Fifteen years after Winter's Tales, Dinesen published Last Tales (1957), containing some of her finest stories. This volume includes "The Cardinal's First Tale, " an excellent defense of her art and a critique of naturalism. In 1958 appeared Anecdotes of Destiny. Her last book, Shadows on the Grass (1961), is a pendant to Out of Africa.
She died on September 6, 1962.
Dinesen was the first Danish author to achieve world fame since Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Her influence on Danish literature was especially strong in the 1950s when, through her stories and personal contact, she was an inspiration to younger authors searching for new means of expression.
Blixen was considered several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
For her literary accomplishments, Blixen was awarded the Danish Holberg Medal in 1949, the Ingenio et Arti medal in 1950, granted the inaugural Hans Christian Andersen Scholarship of the Danish Writers Association in 1955 and received the Henrik Pontoppidan Memorial Foundation Grant in 1959.
Karen Blixen's portrait was featured on the front of the Danish 50-krone banknote, 1997 series, from 7 May 1999 to 25 August 2005. She also featured on Danish postage stamps that were issued in 1980 and 1996. The Asteroid 3318 Blixen was named in her honor on her 100th birthday.
(In the classic Babettes Feast, a mysterious Frenchwoma...)
(Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in ...)
(If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is t...)
(Seven gothic tales from Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Af...)
Quotations:
"It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told. "
"I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser. .. "
"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. "
"The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred. "
"There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive. "
Blixen was diagnosed with syphilis.
She was a heavy smoker.
Quotes from others about the person
"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen. "
Ernest Hemingway as quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)
"Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that. "
Raymond Carver in Writers at Work (1986) edited by George Plimpton
While still young, Dinesen spent many of her holidays with her paternal cousin's family, the Blixen-Fineckes, in Skåne in the south of Sweden. She first fell in love with the dashing equestrian Hans, but he did not reciprocate. She therefore decided to accept the favours of his twin brother, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and they announced their engagement on 23 December 1912, to the family's surprise. She and Blixen married in Mombasa on January 14, 1914.
By 1919, the marriage had run into serious difficulties, causing her husband to request a divorce in 1920. Against her wishes, the couple separated in 1921, and were officially divorced in 1925.
He was a Swedish baron, writer, and African big-game hunter.
He was a Danish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.
