The author was born Karen Christentze Dinesen 17 April 1885 on a rural estate north of Copenhagen. The wooded property called Rungstedlund faces east toward the Øresund, the channel dividing Denmark and Sweden. Its timber and stucco manor house was once an inn--the celebrated eighteenth-century Danish poet Johannes Ewald lived there for a time. Dinesen grew up inspired by literature. Her grandfather Adolph Wilhelm Dinesen had been a friend of the writer Hans Christian Andersen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, wrote Jagtbreve (1888; translated as Boganis' Letters from the Hunt, 1987) and Paris under Communen (Paris under the Commune, 1871), works acclaimed by the greatest critic of his day, Georg Brandes. Many of Dinesen's family, including her sister Ellen, her aunt Mary Bess Westenholz, and her brother, Thomas, were writers. From youth she had been steeped in Nordic mythology. As a child she loved ghost stories and magic, and she devoured stories of the supernatural, especially those exalting the mystical powers of women.
Dinesen's father was not titled, but his first cousins, the Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs's, were related to the Danish royal family.
