Karen Christentze Dinesen moved from Denmark to Kenya in 1914, where she married her second cousin, Bror, and became the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke. Despite the title, the Blixens were destined to a hard life as owners of a sprawling farm and coffee plantation that was never a financial success. Out of Africa, written under Karen Blixen's pen name Isak Dinesen, chronicles her experiences, harsh and beautiful alike, on the high plateau bordering on the Ngong Hills. The marriage was often an unhappy one, and the couple was divorced seven years after their union. But Dinesen had fallen in love with her new home and remained there quite contentedly, running the farm on her own until 1931, when collapsing finances forced her to return to Denmark. Her story of coping as a European settler in the midst of diverse African cultures captures the rapidly changing social and political landscapes of British East Africa, as well as the decline of the African wilderness in the face of immigration from Europe.
British East Africa. The land that became Kenya was sparsely populated by small numbers of native peoples until well into the nineteenth century.
