Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author best known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She wrote extensively in both Danish and English, most notably Out of Africa which details her experience living in Kenya and managing a coffee plantation with her husband. Financial difficulties and the failure of the plantation forced her to return to Denmark in 1931.

1. Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works both in Danish and in English. She is best known, at least in English, for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, , Babette's Feastboth which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. In Denmark she is best known for her works Out of Africa (Danish Den afrikanske Farm ) and Seven Gothic Tales (Danish Syv fantastiske Fortællinger ). KAREN BLIXEN

2. Early years Karen Dinesen was the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dines en and Ingeborg Westenholz, and the sister of Thomas Dinesen . She was born into a Unitarian bourgeois family in Rungsted , on the island of Zealand , in Denmark , and she studied art in Copenhagen , Paris , and Rome . She began publishing fiction in various Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola the name of the Seminole leader, possibly inspired by her father's connection with Native Americans . From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians. Biography

3. Karen Blixen Museum, Kenya 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 tribespeople who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival. Karen Blixen later wrote about,the couple's early life in Africa. "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!" Life in Africa

4. The two were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. The Blixens separated in 1921 and were divorced in 1925. During her early years in Kenya Karen Blixen met the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton , and after her separation she and Finch Hatton developed a close friendship which eventually became a long-term love affair. Finch Hatton used Blixen's farmhouse as a home base between 1926 and 1931, when he wasn't leading one of his clients on safari.

5. He died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, due to the worldwide economic depression and the unsuitability of her farm's soil for coffee growing, forced Blixen to abandon her beloved farm. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned to Denmark , where she lived for the rest of her life.