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| At the Blixen Museum near Copenhagen, Denmark. |
My friend
Caroline Hatton, a children’s writer and frequent contributor to this blog, took
the photos in this post in June 2025.
When the movie Out of Africa
came out in 1985, I saw it in a big-screen theater. As an epic love story between
a Danish woman who had a farm in Africa and a British big-game hunter, it won
Oscars for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and four
more.
Forty years later, my husband and I planned
to visit Denmark. By then I had learned that the book, Out of Africa, on
which the movie is loosely based, is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, the pen name of
Karen Blixen (1885-1962), an icon in the culture of Denmark. (Isak means “he
who laughs” and Dinesen was Blixen’s maiden name.)
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| Blixen Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (D), Norway (N), Sweden (S)*. |
An online search for her name found the Karen Blixen
Museumhttps://blixen.dk/en/ at Rungstedlund, her farm near Copenhagen. The museum
is a park-like estate. In the photo at the top of this post, the farmhouse (on
the left) is her former home. The former barn (on the right) is the Cultural
Events Centre with meeting room, café, and gift shop. Imagine attending a
writer’s conference there! The property contains a pond, bridge, orchard, former
cow and horse pasture, and woods with trees centuries old. Part of the property
is the Bird Sanctuary she created as a haven for migratory species.
Our self-guided
visit began through ground-floor rooms full of info (in Danish and English)
about Blixen’s life, photos, and objects such as her Corona typewriter and
original editions of her most famous works. This
large farm is where she was born in 1885 and grew up privileged, enjoying
nature and animals. She loved stories, listening to them and telling her own. By
age 8, she wrote her first fiction piece. By age 11, she wrote and performed
plays.
She wanted to achieve something
remarkable, not just marry a rich man. Her family was supportive
of her quest as a writer. Her first publication was a tale (submitted by her
aunt) in a literary magazine the year Blixen turned 22. But she published only
two more tales, so she endured years of despair because she didn’t know what to
do with her life.
At age 28, she married a rich man
after all and started managing a coffee farm owned by family members, in
British East Africa, a colony which included today’s Kenya. While reading the
museum posters, I liked comparing facts in her real life with fiction in the
movie and finding matches (married the day after she arrived in Africa…
diagnosed with syphilis…). I gazed at the black-and-white photo of Denys Finch
Hatton, the love of her life. “He was the most intelligent man she had ever
met, and he was a good listener when she read aloud to him from the stories she
wrote.”
After 17 years, the farm, which had
never made any money because the area was too cold to grow coffee, was shut
down. This left Blixen to despair again, about what she was going to do with
her life. She started writing a book, hoping to finish it after going home to
Denmark. Finch Hatton did die in a plane crash not long before she left Africa.
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| Green room. |
She came
home emotionally, physically, and financially devastated. Finch Hatton’s
favorite chair (the second chair from the right in the above photo), in which
he sat by the fireplace at her farm in Africa and listened to her stories, went
in the Green Room on the ground floor, not far from her winter writing desk (on
the left in the photo). This room stayed warm in cold weather.
She finished writing her book in
English. U.S. publishers rejected it. London publishers rejected it. Finally an
American author, who was a friend of Blixen’s aunt, gave the manuscript to her own
publisher. He published Blixen’s first book, Seven Gothic Tales, in 1934
when she was 49. It was a hit in the U.S. and the U.K., but the Danish
version she produced got mixed reviews in Denmark.
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| African collection. |
Our visit
led us past a room full of Blixen’s cherished African mementos. This was where
she wrote in the summer. While in Africa,
she had proposed a travelogue—unsuccessfully. Yet she kept working on it.
Finally, in 1936 it was published as a memoir, Seventeen Years in Africa,
in a newspaper Sunday supplement. Months later, a new chapter moved her London
publisher to accept the book: Out of Africa got rave reviews in Denmark,
England, and the U.S. in 1937, the year she turned 52.
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| Dining room. |
We saw the
dining room as it was when Blixen staged enchanting dinner parties—for no more
than seven carefully selected guests. Her conversations with great minds from
all fields of thought inspired her. She viewed gastronomy as an art form.
“Babette’s Feast,” the tale she wrote about a French master chef who wowed her
guests, was published in 1952 and made into a 1987 Danish movie which won the
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
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| Kitchen. |
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| Kitchen. |
In the
kitchen, Blixen’s housekeeper prepared the famous dinners. In the adjacent
room, Blixen arranged flowers from her cutting garden for every room in her
house. Menus and bouquets provided extra outlets for her creativity.
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| Library. |
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| Library. |
Blixen
loved to read broadly across many genres. In her library, we saw some of the
books that inspired her.
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| Bedroom. |
Upstairs,
we walked through Blixen’s bedroom, as it was when she lived there and died in
her bed in 1962. All the rooms look as they did then.
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| Looking out the bedroom window. |
Outside
the bedroom window, beyond the lawn and across a public road, is the sea
corridor that separates Denmark from Sweden. Today, the view is filled by a
marina, which didn’t exist in Blixen’s lifetime.
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| Porch. |
When we
were done visiting the house, we strolled through the manicured grounds.
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| Grave. |
In a far corner
of the park, Blixen’s grave, marked unobtrusively by a flat stone under a magnificent
beech tree in her Bird Sanctuary, was honored by a single red rose. She chose
the site and pre-arranged her funeral consecration ceremony. She also founded
the non-profit that still owns the estate. What an uncommon mind and drive she had!
*
Credit for the globe image: Rob984 - Derived from Germany on the globe (Germany
centered).svg, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Read CarolineArnold’s post about Copenhagen.
