Isak Dinesen's "Letters from Africa, 1914–1931" … is the raw material from which the author quarried her world-famous memoir "Out of Africa," published in 1938. Reserved, stoic, and tactful, that work gave little hint of its author's painful private life, and its admirably pure and exact prose produces an effect of self-possession and self-sufficiency. The letters, an unconscious—and unself-conscious—self-portrait, were written to her mother, her brother Thomas, her Aunt Bess, and her sister Ellen, and their spontaneity reproduces the reality of the author's life in Kenya: struggle, anxiety, loneliness, with intermittent periods of elation. The letters demonstrate her culture and her intimate involvement with art, literature, and ideas—particularly social thought about the role of women—and they share with the memoir a passion for Africa, its landscape, its peoples, its plants, and its wildlife. (p. 120)

When these letters close, their author, at the age of forty-six, is returning to live as a dependent on her mother—a failure in her own eyes, with no formal profession, no husband, no lover, no child, no money, and ruined health. She had invested her ego in the lost plantation; two men she loved had both left her; and though she had written and painted, her record of publication and exhibition was scanty. She cannot have known that in writing "Seven Gothic Tales" and "Out of Africa"—two international best-sellers—she was about to find what she had been seeking in Africa: a recognized use for her abilities.

The solitary decade on the plantation may have been an exhausting detour, yet it bears more than a passing relation to her literary work, since it was at once a quasi-literary romantic flight and a romantic pursuit. Like many white settlers in Kenya, Karen was fleeing modern business civilization (although, since plantation agriculture is enmeshed in international finance, she could not flee very far), and, just as the Romantic movement rediscovered the Middle ages, Karen's first blissful evocations of her life in Africa recall the life of the heroes of Norse sagas. Her letters suggest that Kenya's white-settler society took its tone from culturally retrograde Europeans: restless younger sons, like Bror and Denys, for whom a romanticized, Walter Scott version of feudalism was congenial, and who, like their medieval ancestors—and like the Africans they hired as bearers and servants—found only war and hunting really interesting.

It is confusing to think of such men, a thousand years behind the times, as agents of modernization, but that, apparently, was how they justified their presence in Africa. Karen, too, romanticizes the exotic, the primitive, and the violent: her comment "I do not believe that any normal person can live in lion country without trying to shoot them" is as dated as "I should like to give all young women two pieces of advice: to have their hair cut short and to learn to drive a car." Both comments, however, reflect her feminism. Her pride in her marksmanship and her leisure in shooting wild animals that we now seek to preserve arose at least in part from resentment of European shooting parties she recalls, from which women were excluded. She saw the plantation as a feudal manor of which she was the traditional lord with the traditional lordly privileges, such as hunting (about which she sometimes expressed heroic and mystical feelings that I find hard to understand), and the blameless lions suffered.

Most of her discussions of the role of women, however, are pithy and sensible, and many of her observations clarify present problems. I particularly like her riposte to her aunt's statement that the true role of women is to live for others: "One can 'live for' humanity, or for the poor children of Senegløse, but one cannot 'live for' Mr. Petersen, at least without spoiling him or making him unhappy, usually both." Unfortunately, her abstract wisdom did not translate into practical judgment; she writes of "giving up my life to loving the independence-seeking Denys," who, like other spoiled men (and women, too), in the name of independence became undependable. There is no sign that, coming and going as he chose, he wasted any thought or effort on Karen's problems.

It is likely that the most satisfying human relations Karen knew in Africa were with the black population. Her feeling evolved from a blanket, patronizing approval of the natives to an appreciation of individuals which allowed her to be genuinely angry and genuinely affectionate and genuinely respectful. She speedily noted that African men had, in their own eyes, lost their raison d'être, because the British had suppressed intertribal warfare. Working for wages on other people's plantations was no more alluring to these erstwhile warriors than it had been to Bror, and Karen commented with indignation that some British settlers' notion of solving the labor problem was to raise taxes, so that the need for cash would force more blacks out of the native subsistence economy and into the cash-wage labor market. Through these letters, we glimpse the workings of a most unsystematic system: one set of colonial policies—suppressing war and the slave trade and diffusing medical care—tended to increase the black population, while another set of policies allocated an inadequate amount of land to the existing population. Well before Karen left, there was not enough room in the native reserves—the only places where blacks had any secure tenure. With the benefit of hindsight, this all looks less like a government than like a self-destroying machine—a happening rather than a colony. Karen saw it as oppressive but durable. It seems never to have crossed her mind that colonies would cease to be. As a historic rarity—a beneficiary of injustice who fought injustice—she busied herself with every kind of practical assistance to her "black brother," convinced that "as a woman and a foreigner" she could not express her anger freely, except, of course, in letters home…. Her intelligence and her fluency are attractive, her character yet more so. She remained superior to her circumstances, and her generosity was always stronger than her misery as she failed—perhaps inevitably—in her attempt to assert the rights of twentieth-century women in an existence imagined by nineteenth-century men. (pp. 122-24)