The Experience:
Danish writer Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa who is also known by her pen name, Isak Dinesen, was born Karen Christenze Dinesen on April 17, 1885. She was born in Rungsted, Denmark, north of Copenhagen. and was called Tanne by her family and friends.
The young Karen marries Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen Fincke Baron and moves to Kenya to run a coffee plantation below the Ngong Hills about ten miles southwest of Nairobi. They have trouble making it work, after discovering that he is unfaithful, Karen develops feelings for Denys, a game hunter. Denys Finch Hatton, dies in a plane crash in 1931 which prompts Blixen to return to Denmark.
While still in Kenya, Blixen is said to have written to her brother Thomas, "I have begun to do what we brothers and sisters do when we don't know what else to resort to, I have started to write a book."; which later becomes her memoir.
As a young girl, Karen Blixen often mixed her writing exercises with her sketches and was a good artist as well. She believed that one form of expression was inextricably tied to the other. she was only 23, Karen Blixen, when she was only 23 used a pseudonym – Peter Lawless and published some humorous drawings in a political-satirical weekly magazine.
Karen Blixen used the pseudonym Isak Dinesen when she published the Seven Gothic Tales in English and Danish. She published Out of Africa in the US under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen but changed to Karen Blixen for the Danish version.
The Karen Blixen Museum sits in a beautiful garden and you can see the tractors and other equipment used by the coffee farm. Inside the house, you can see Blixen's library, her office where her typewriter still sits, the kitchen with her pots and pans, her cuckoo clock that the Masai children came to see every day at noon and the patio where she sat down to prescribe medicine to the people.
