'It stands for the recognition of a great mystery about oneself, long buried and suddenly come upon again by surprise. 'I suddenly understood everything' was a phrase Dinesen used 'almost liturgically' in her writing.

Dinesen wrote in English, then translated her writings back into Danish, and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Anecdotes of Destiny includes 'Babette's Feast,' originally written for a magazine, which also became the basis of a movie. It was chosen by the Book-of-the Month Club as its February selection, with a print run a 50,000 copies. The couple operated a coffee plantation in Kenya until they divorced in 1921, and Dinesen ran the plantation herself until 1931, while keeping company with Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford in the movie).ĭinesen's Seven Gothic Tales published in January 1934, was an immediate critical and commercial success in the U.S. She attended the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, and studied in four European countries before marrying her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Rejecting her mother's more conventional outlook on life, Dinesen early on sought the ecstatic in life. Her passionate author/adventurer father committed suicide when she was a girl, possibly after discovering he had syphillis. Portrayed by Meryl Streep in 1986's Best Picture Out of Africa -based on her 1937 book of the same title-Karen Blixen, known under the pen-name Isak Dinesen and in Africa as Tania, was born in Denmark to a well-off Unitarian family.

Denys finch hatton isak dinesen