Badass Women: Karen Blixen, Denmark’s author

   Due to my upcoming trip to Copenhagen, I have chosen
to write about Karen Blixen for this month’s Badass Woman. Blixen is one of the
most famous Danish authors, and many American readers will also recognize her
after reading this post.

   Born in 1885 in Rungstedlund, about 15 minutes north of
Copenhagen, Blixen was educated by her father in a freer manner than that of
most girls of her age until his death when she was ten. Upon his death, she
went to live with an aunt who raised her in strict Unitarian tradition. Under
her aunt’s tutelage, she felt constricted and longed to be free. 

   She was soon to attain that freedom, living in
Switzerland for a year with her sister in order to learn French, and then when
she married. Having been rejected by her first choice, Blixen accepted the
advances of his twin brother and they moved to Africa to start a coffee
company, marrying upon her arrival to Kenya.

   Soon after beginning the company, it became apparent that
her husband had no desire to run it, so Blixen became the company’s manager,
and to this day the Nairobi suburb where she lived in still named ‘Karen’.  She also learned English at this time, as it
was the language in which she ran the company.

   With the Great Depression came the failure of the
company, and already having divorced her husband (he was unfaithful on numerous
occasions, and she was diagnosed with syphilis as a result), Blixen moved back
to Denmark to live with her mother. This is when she started writing. Although
her first book, Seven Gothic Tales,
was not an overnight success, its eventual choice as a Book-of-the-Month saw sales
skyrocket, and ultimately led to its publication in the U.S. Blixen then
published Out of Africa. (Yes, the
book that the movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford was based on.)

   Writing in English, French and Danish, and under numerous
surnames, Blixen rose to success and continued writing until her death in 1962.
She has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many
modern critics look back on her work and label her a racist and a colonialist,
but she was a woman of her time, and an independent one at that. One who her
wrote of her life experience and lived her life the way she wanted to.

   She was a divorced woman living in a time when divorced
women weren’t accepted, a writer in a time when unmarried women had a difficult
time pursuing professions, and a woman living in a man’s world. (Sometimes I
still feel it’s that way.) Not to mention, she was also a childless woman,
which was a very brave thing to be in the 1900s. And for that we must give her
credit.

   I plan to visit her home at Rungstedlund on my trip, so
be on the look out for another post and also pictures!

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