Isak Dinesen
From Philosopedia
Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen) [Baroness] (17 April 1885 - 7 September 1962)
A Danish author, Blixen wrote primarily in English and became well-known for Out of Africa (1937), an autobiographical account of her life on a Kenya coffee plantation. In it, she described good and evil - God and Satan - which are like warring forces that force all creatures to accept their fate.
She began by publishing fiction in various Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of the Seminole Indian leader, possibly inspired by her father's connection with American Indians. From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark. (Wilhelm Dinesen hanged himself in 1895 when Karen was ten, after being diagnosed with syphilis).
In 1914 Karen Dinesen married her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, (from whom she may have contracted syphilis), and the couple moved to Kenya where they operated a coffee plantation. As she later wrote, "Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!" The Blixens separated, however, in 1921 and were divorced in 1925.
During this time she met and fell in love with English big game hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, with whom she lived from 1926 to 1931, suffering two miscarriages. Finch Hatton's death in a plane crash in 1931, compounded by the failure of the coffee plantation (due partly to the world-wide Depression), forced her to abandon the project and leave Africa.
She wrote many works, including Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Winter’s Tales (1942), and Last Tales (1957).
A freethinker, she wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen.
