Introduction

Like Thorkild Bjørnvig I read Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen when the book was first published to great acclaim in 1934. American readers then knew only that it was the work of a Continental European author writing in English. We learned soon that Isak Dinesen was in reality Baroness Blixen-Finecke of Rungstedlund near Copenhagen. Dinesen was her maiden name; Isak she had chosen because it meant “laughter” in Hebrew. From her own account in Out of Africa, published in 1938, we discovered that Karen Blixen was quite as extraordinary as any tale she had told, that she had lived for seventeen years in Kenya, where she had run a coffee farm, hunted lions, walked with Masai warriors, and sat with Arab sheiks. While waiting for the rainy season, she had begun to put down some of the tales that she told to entertain a friend on his return from his safaris. When the bottom dropped out of the coffee market, her farm was sold, and her friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, was killed when his small plane crashed. Having lost everything that was important to her, Karen Blixen returned to Denmark to begin a new life as the writer Isak Dinesen. With the publication of Winter’s Talesin 1942 and the other books that followed until her death twenty years later, her worldwide reputation continued to grow. All her books were written while she was gravely ill, existing, we were told, largely on a diet of grapes,