"In Karen Blixens Search for Self: The Making of "Out of Africa," Patti M. Marxsen presents a twenty-first-century response to Blixens iconic memoir, originally published in 1937, now regarded as a classic of twentieth-century literature. The methodology of this "book about a book" draws on seasoned historical perspectives of European colonial activities in Africa in the early twentieth century and engages Blixens letters, tales, speeches, interviews, the photographic record of her possessions, memoir literature of others who knew her, and three generations of scholarship, including pointed postcolonial critiques. Mixing scholarly research with personal reflection, Marxsens volume recounts an inspiring tale of a writers evolution, along with a reflection on the art and craft of memoir. As a modern woman both trapped and liberated by privilege, Karen Christentze Dinesen Blixen (1885-1962) experienced considerable personal and financial challenges during her years living in Kenya (1914-1931), a period that Marxsen approaches as a belated coming-of-age journey as opposed to a romantic tale. When Blixen returned to Denmark in 1931, she did so at age forty-six as a bankrupt woman in a physical and mental state of fragility with no idea about what she would do or how she would live in Denmarks "bourgeois" society that she viewed as "incarceration." Only when Blixen set out to reinvent herself with the "liberating mask" of the pseudonym "Isak Dinesen" did she begin to realize her potential as a storyteller, and writing about her African years allowed her to find her narrative voice. Blixens process of loss and recovery through writing constitutes the frame of Marxsens book, just as it constitutes the frame of Out of Africa.

Within that story, Marxsen traces Blixens inner life through letters and writings to get at the origins of her imaginative power, her instinctive multiculturalism (considered "eccentric" in colonial Kenya), and the feminist instincts of a creative woman in a new century. She continues the story through the contested legacies of the book, including its serving as the basis for the acclaimed, Academy Award-winning film released in 1985. This new study of Blixens widely read memoir, which has remained consistently in print for almost a century, will broaden understandings of the authors complex search for self, the skill of her literary art, and the books evolving afterlife"-- Provided by publisher.