7 September 1962: Karen Blixen dies

Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen, died on 7 September 1962. She was a Danish author best known for Out of Africa, a memoir of her life as the owner of a coffee plantation in colonial Kenya in the 1920s.

In 1914 Karen (Isak) Dinesen and her new husband Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, established a home in Kenya to operate a coffee plantation bought with funds donated to them by their families.

Life in Africa was initially happy for the couple, but eventually it gave way to the realities and hardships that would severely challenge them. Their marriage, based on the idea of sharing an adventure, did not last and they separated in 1921, with Karen being left to run the coffee plantation alone. They divorced in 1925.

Blixen met and fell in love with English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, with whom she lived from 1926. They never married, most likely due to her health issues, and she was never able to have children. The affair continued until his death in a plane crash in 1931. It left her devastated, and when the farm’s fortunes collapsed the same year, she returned to her family home in Denmark to focus on her writing. All her books sold very well around the world and were critically acclaimed.

Blixen’s seventeen years in Kenya became the basis of what remains her best-known work, the memoir Out of Africa published in 1937. It begins with the simple yet memorable line: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

Unable to eat, Blixen died from emaciation and malnutrition on 7 September 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family’s estate where she was born, at the age of 77.

Her legacy is a rich one – in her lifetime she received many medals and prizes and was several times considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but never won it. Her African and her Danish homes are both museums and there is a rich archive of her papers in the Royal Danish Library.