Karen Blixen is known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries, Tania Blixen, used in German-speaking countries, Osceola, and Pierre Andrezel.
59 Facts About Karen Blixen
2.
Karen Blixen is noted, particularly in Denmark, for her Seven Gothic Tales.
3.
Karen Blixen was considered several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but it wasn't awarded because judges were reportedly concerned about showing favoritism to Scandinavian writers, according to Danish reports.
4.
Karen Blixen Dinesen was born in the manor house of Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen.
5.
Karen Blixen's father, Wilhelm Dinesen, was a writer and army officer, including in the 1864 war by Denmark against Prussia and who joined the French army against Prussia and wrote about the Paris Commune.
6.
Karen Blixen was from a wealthy family of Jutland landowners closely connected to the monarchy, the established church and conservative politics.
7.
Karen Blixen Dinesen was the second oldest in a family of three sisters and two brothers.
8.
Karen Blixen wrote throughout his life and his memoir, Boganis Jagtbreve became a minor classic in Danish literature.
9.
Karen Blixen hanged himself on 28 March 1895 when Karen was nine years old.
10.
Karen Blixen first fell in love with the dashing equestrian baron Hans, but he did not reciprocate.
11.
Karen Blixen 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.
12.
Karen Blixen herself attributed her symptoms, in a letter to her brother Thomas, to syphilis acquired at 29 years old from her husband toward the end of their first year of marriage in 1915.
13.
Karen Blixen had been locally prescribed mercury and arsenic, a treatment for the disease in her time.
14.
Karen Blixen returned to Denmark in June 1915 for treatment which proved successful.
15.
Karen Blixen returned in 1922, investing in a land development company.
16.
Karen Blixen would go to Government House where she had befriended Joan Grigg who was the bored wife of the governor.
17.
Karen Blixen stood with one foot on the running-board of the car, and a finger in the book, reading out to me a poem we had been discussing.
18.
The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Karen Blixen returned to Denmark in August 1931 to live with her mother.
19.
Karen Blixen remained in Rungstedlund for the rest of her life.
20.
Unable to find a translator she was satisfied with, Karen Blixen prepared the Danish versions herself, though they are not translations, but rather versions of the stories with differing details.
21.
Karen Blixen was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat in 1939.
22.
Five years after the publication of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen published a collection of short stories called Winter's Tales.
23.
In "Sorrow-acre", the best-known story of the collection, Karen Blixen explores victimization and oppression.
24.
Karen Blixen did not receive further communication about Winter's Tales until after the war ended, when she received correspondence praising the stories from American troops who had read them in the Armed Services Editions during the conflict.
25.
Karen Blixen worked on a novel she called Albondocani for many years, hoping to produce a volume in the style of Les Hommes de bonne volonte by Jules Romains, with interwoven stories across several volumes.
26.
Karen Blixen worked on several collections at once, categorizing them according to their themes and whether she thought they were mostly to make money or literary.
27.
Karen Blixen jumped between writing the collections of stories for Albondocani to Anecdotes of Destiny to New Gothic Tales and New Winter's Tales.
28.
Karen Blixen crafted her English tales in a more direct manner and her Danish tales in a 19th-century writing style which she felt would appeal more to them.
29.
Karen Blixen initially did not want the book to be nominated, but eventually accepted the distinction.
30.
The horrors experienced by the young heroines have been interpreted as an allegory of Nazism, though Karen Blixen denied that interpretation, claiming instead that the novel was a distraction that had helped her to escape the feeling of being imprisoned by the war.
31.
Karen Blixen's writing was not just a retelling of tales, however; it was a complex layering of clues and double entendres which force the reader to deduce Blixen's intent and draw conclusions.
32.
The story, for Karen Blixen, was vital to expression: it gives a recitation of experience, and simultaneously a potential vision of the possible.
33.
Karen Blixen planned for Anecdotes of Destiny to be a final part of the Last Tales in 1953, but as she prepared all the stories, she decided to publish Anecdotes as a separate volume.
34.
Karen Blixen wanted both books to appear simultaneously, but because of publication issues Anecdotes was delayed for another year.
35.
In 1959, Karen Blixen made her only trip to the United States.
36.
Karen Blixen was the feature of a Life Magazine article in the edition of 19 January 1959 and attended two Broadway openings.
37.
Feted by the well-to-do of New York society, Karen Blixen was invited to dine with socialites Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt.
38.
Karen Blixen was photographed by Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton; the guest of John Steinbeck, who hosted a cocktail party in her honor; and serenaded by Maria Callas.
39.
When Karen Blixen expressed a desire to meet Marilyn Monroe, the author Carson McCullers arranged a meeting with Monroe and her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller.
40.
When Karen Blixen was diagnosed with syphilis in 1915, she was treated with mercury tablets.
41.
Karen Blixen took approximately 1 gram of mercury per day for almost a year according to some reports, while others show she did so for only a few months.
42.
Karen Blixen then spent time in Denmark for treatment and was given arsenic, which she continued to take in drop form as a treatment for the syphilis that she thought was the cause of her continued pain.
43.
Karen Blixen had reported severe bouts of abdominal pain as early as 1921, while she was still in Kenya.
44.
Mogens Fog, who was Karen Blixen's neurologist, thought that her gastric problems were attributable to syphilis, in spite of the fact that blood and spinal fluid tests were negative.
45.
Karen Blixen's writing prowess suggests that she did not suffer from the mental degeneration of late stages of syphilis.
46.
Karen Blixen did suffer a mild permanent loss of sensation in her legs that could be attributed to use of the arsenic-based anti-syphilis drug salvarsan.
47.
Concerned about gaining weight, Karen Blixen took strong laxatives "during her whole adult life", which after years of misuse affected her digestive system.
48.
Karen Blixen was a heavy smoker, which when combined with her minimal food intake led to her developing a peptic ulcer.
49.
Karen Blixen's publisher indicated that Blixen's syphilis was a myth in private, but publicly, Blixen blamed syphilis for her chronic health issues.
50.
Unable to eat, Karen Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family's estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition.
51.
Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Karen Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s and when Hemingway won the prize in 1954, he stated that Bernard Berenson, Carl Sandburg and Karen Blixen deserved the prize more than he did.
52.
In 2012, the Nobel records were opened after 50 years and it was revealed that Karen Blixen was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Anouilh.
53.
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.
54.
Karen Blixen featured on Danish postage stamps that were issued in 1980 and 1996.
55.
The Asteroid 3318 Karen Blixen was named in her honor on her 100th birthday.
56.
Karen Blixen lived most of her life at the family estate Rungstedlund, which was acquired by her father in 1879.
57.
In 2013 The Karen Blixen Museum joined the Nordic museum portal.
58.
When Karen Blixen returned to Denmark in 1931, she sold her property to a developer, Remi Martin, who divided the land into 20 acres parcels.
59.
The Nairobi suburb that emerged on the land where Blixen farmed coffee is named Karen.