The buyer, Remi Martin, who planned to carve it into residential plots, offered to allow Blixen to stay in the house. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it. 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. She was well suited to the work – fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers. In 1921 the couple separated, and in 1925 they were divorced Karen took over the management of the farm on her own. But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a talented hunter and a well liked companion, was an unfaithful husband and a poor businessman who squandered much of the money to be invested in the farm. The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting safaris which Karen later remembered as paradisiacal. The new acquisitions included the site of the house which features so prominently in Out of Africa. 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 six thousand acres (24 km²). It was managed by Europeans, including, at the start, Karen's brother Thomas – but most of the labour was provided by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180 days of labour in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands. The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed their farm as a coffee plantation instead. The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland below the Ngong Hills about ten miles (16 km) southwest of Nairobi, which at the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot on the Uganda Railway. Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony known today as Kenya. The book has sometimes been published under the author's pen name, Isak Dinesen. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen.
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