Karen Blixen Archive

Karen Blixen (1885–1962), née Dinesen, was a Danish author most famous for her memoir Out of Africa (1937), which describes her seventeen years as a European colonist in Kenya (then British East Africa), where she had moved in 1913 to marry her second cousin. She and her husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, owned a coffee plantation, but their marriage and farm business eventually failed, and she moved back to Denmark in 1931. Blixen wrote under several pseudonyms, including Isak Dinesen and Tania Blixen. The Karen Blixen Archive contains 181 boxes of material, including a wide range of primary sources: manuscripts, personal correspondence, travel diaries, guestbooks, account books relating to the management of her farm in Kenya and her finances.