The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland below the Ngong Hills about 16 km (10 mi) southwest of Nairobi, which at the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot on the Uganda Railway.
[2] When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to 2,400 ha (6,000 acres).
But the climate and soil of her particular tract were not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields as well as a pestilence of grasshoppers one season - and the falling market price of coffee was no help.
[3] Blixen moved back to the family's estate of Rungstedlund (in Rungsted, Denmark), and lived with her mother; there she took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth.
The first two focus primarily on Africans who lived or had business on the farm, and include close observations of native ideas about justice and punishment in the wake of a gruesome accidental shooting.
The book ends with the farm sold, and with Blixen on the Uganda Railway, heading toward the steamer on the coast, looking back and watching her beloved Ngong Hills diminish behind her.
Their farms were home to herds of elephants and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards – to a culture accustomed to the traditional pleasures of European aristocrats, Kenya was a hunter's dream.
Aggressive agricultural development had spread the colony's human footprint far out into the game country; many of the new farmers were middle class retired Army officers recruited by a government settlement programme after the First World War.
And as the clouds of war threatened Europe once again, the colony became as famous (or infamous) for the misbehaviour of the wife-swapping, hard-partying Happy Valley set as it was for being a dreamy horizon of Empire.
In Baroness Blixen's descriptions of the Africa she knew, a note of mourning for this irretrievably lost world frequently colours her stories of magnificent isolation and the redemptive qualities of a life lived in partnership with nature.
This process seems largely devoid of Western-style moral or ethical considerations: most of the energy expended in deliberations is directed at determining the proper amount of reparation the perpetrator's father must pay, in livestock, to the families of the victims.
Later, Blixen describes a British colonial criminal trial in Nairobi: the defendant is European settler Jasper Abraham who is accused of causing, by intention or indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named Kitosch.
Much of Blixen's energy in Out of Africa is spent trying to capture for the reader the character of the Africans who lived on or near her farm, and the efforts of European colonists (herself included) to co-exist with them.
Blixen also describes in some detail the lives of the Somali Muslims who emigrated south from Somaliland to work in Kenya, and a few members of the substantial Indian merchant minority which played a large role in the colony's early development.
Some of those customs, such as the valuation of daughters based on the dowry they will bring at marriage, are perceived as ugly to Western eyes; Blixen's voice in describing these traditions is largely free of judgment.
Blixen limits most of her reflections to those Europeans who were her frequent or favourite guests, such as a man she identifies only as “Old Knudsen”, a down-and-out Danish fisherman who invites himself to take up residence on her farm, and then dies there several months later.
The film only received mixed to generally positive reviews from critics but, nonetheless, won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Pollack and Best Adapted Screenplay.