It’s the birthday of Danish author Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), real name Karen Christence Dinesen, Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, best known for her memoir Out of Africa (1937) and for the (longish) short story “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were made into movies, and the latter of which is in fact one of the greatest movies of all time, and if you disagree with that then you and I, sir, will be having words. WORDS.

Fun weird fact that I’m still trying to wrap my brain around: “Babette’s Feast” was first published serially in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1950. So there’s that.

Dinesen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, which is where she died 77 years later. Her family was upper-class; her beloved father was a soldier and writer whose memoir, Letters From the Hunt, is evidently a “minor classic” of Danish lit. He killed himself by hanging when Dinesen was nearly 10. She went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914, and moved with him to a coffee plantation in what is now Kenya.

The marriage ended seven years later, but Dinesen compensated by falling in love with A) big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton and B) Africa. Dinesen considered herself to be her lover’s Scheherazade, and in fact many of her tales feature storytellers who tell stories within stories within stories. Dinesen managed the plantation for another 10 years before coffee tanked and she had to give it up. By then, her lover had also died in a plane crash, and to add to her troubles, Dinesen had to cope with the ravages of syphilis, a little gift from her husband given in their first year of marriage. She returned to her mother’s household in Denmark.

Dinesen published her first story collection, Seven Gothic Tales, in 1934, and it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in the U.S., where Dinesen was treated very warmly by American critics and audiences alike; she felt understood in the U.S. in a way she did not in her own country. She wrote Out of Africa several years later. Winter’s Tales, another collection of stories, came out in 1942, and in 1944 she published her only novel, The Angelic Avengers. The collection Last Tales came out in 1957 and Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales came out posthumously in 1977.

Dinesen was famously flamboyant in her style, a glamorous, emaciated woman. Margaret Atwood described her as “a magical creature from a fairy tale: an impossibly aged woman, a thousand years old at least” (read the article here). Dinesen struggled with her health for years before her death but never gave up writing. Considered several times for the Nobel Prize, Dinesen never won it, and when Ernest Hemingway won it in 1954, he said he would have been happier if the award had gone to Dinesen.

Have a fine Wednesday, for goodness’ sake go read “Babette’s Feast” if you never have or watch the very fine movie version, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.