Quote of the Week

I know the cure for everything: saltwater…in one form or another: sweat, tears, or the sea. Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke) 1885 – 1962

Born into an aristocratic Danish family with close ties to royalty, Dinesen was home schooled by her strict Unitarian grandmother, and then continued her education in Rome and Paris. She married her second cousin in 1914 and moved to Kenya, then known as British East Africa. The couple established a successful coffee plantation in Kikuyu tribal lands staffed by local people, but divorced in 1925. Dinesen had a close relationship with Denys Finch-Hatten, an English hunter, safari leader, and aviator who suffered a fatal crash in 1931. The plantation did not survive the world-wide economic depression and Dinesen returned to Denmark, where she concentrated on her writing, producing several books, the best known novel Out of Africa, and the story Babette’s Feast, both of which were later made into films. She was an important literary figure in Denmark and America through the 1950’s, hobnobbing with other intellectuals including Hemingway, Miller, and Capote. She was short listed for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.