Burnside Rare Books

Den Afrikanske Farm [Out of Africa]

Blixen, Karen; [Isak Dinesen]

Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1937.

First Danish edition, fourth printing stated. 384 pp. Bound in publisher's printed wraps. Very Good+ with lean to spine and light wear, toning, soiling, and foxing to wraps. Contemporary ownership signature in pencil to half-title page, light thumbing and occasional foxing to margins, scarcely noticeable; overopened at p. 97. A very nice copy, with much less toning than usual.

An early printing of the Danish aristocrat's memoir, which she wrote first in English and published in Britain as Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Karen Blixen had married her cousin in 1914 and accompanied him to manage a coffee plantation in Kenya. The marriage failed in 1921, and the farm failed ten years later. Blixen's lover, the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, was killed in a plane crash in 1931, and Out of Africa is pervaded by a sense of overwhelming loss.

The memoir received rave reviews in Denmark and abroad, and drew letters of praise from other writers. The American writer Louis Bromfield told Blixen that the "chapter on the death of Finch-Hatton is of extraordinary moving beauty, and the 'farewell' is simple and heartbreaking." In 1985 the book was adapted into a sweeping romantic drama, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, that won seven Academy Awards. Item #140950125

Price: $350