Dinesen, Isak (Vol. 95) - Donald Hannah (essay date October-December 1963)
Donald Hannah (essay date October-December 1963)
SOURCE: "In Memoriam Karen Blixen: Some Aspects of Her Attitude of Life," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXI, No. 4, October-December, 1963, pp. 585-604.
[In the following essay, Hannah examines Dinesen's major works—the autobiography Out of Africa and several of the short stories—focusing on their depiction of the past and evocation of nostalgia.]
It was perhaps typical of that elusive, even enigmatic figure, the late Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, that she was most widely known by her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. But this is the least of the paradoxes with which the reader of her work is faced. Karen Blixen, a Dane, wrote most of her short stories first in English, and then "translated" them into her native language. The deep vein of fantasy and imagination in her work is matched by a rigorous process of selection and control. She was the great story-teller in an age where the...
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