![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Her repeated observation that she ‘died’ into her art, becoming ‘a piece of printed matter’ ( Daguerreotypes), was never more poignantly enacted than in the final years of her life, as her body gradually withered to skeletal, wraith-like proportions, and her writing ultimately had to proceed by dictation while she lay supine to ease the pain that racked her. That poetics becomes especially marked in many of her late productions. Yet like her loss in Africa, her malady also became, paradoxically, a major spur and source of her creativity, as she suggested through her wry description of her syphilis as a sign of the ‘pact she made with the devil in exchange for the gift of story-telling.’ It is hardly surprising that her tales appear so frequently inflected or infected by a poetics of illness, giving new meaning to the ‘decadence’ often associated, rightly or wrongly, with her literary corpus. ![]() When Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from her husband in 1914, it was to prove a fatal event in every sense: she would suffer for the rest of her life from the progressively debilitating effects of the disease. ![]()
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