Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

Dinesen married her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen-Finecke and moved with him to a coffee farm in British East Africa in 1914, contracting syphilis from him early in the marriage and living with its effects for the rest of her life. She ran the farm alone after their 1921 divorce, sustained a long love affair with the big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and lost both the farm, to falling coffee prices, and Finch Hatton, to a plane crash, within the same catastrophic stretch around 1931.

Broke and nearly fifty, she returned to Denmark and reinvented herself as a writer in English, publishing Seven Gothic Tales under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa turned the wrecked farm years into elegy. She was passed over for the Nobel Prize more than once; Hemingway said, accepting his own, that she deserved it instead.