The first thing that needs to be said about this exceptional volume of letters [Letters from Africa 1914–1931] is that it has been attributed to the wrong author. "Isak Dinesen" did not come into being until 1934, almost three years after Karen Blixen had left Africa in the harrowing circumstances that inform the book's closing pages. It's worth making the distinction, if only because the distinction was of such prime importance to its originator: when Karen Blixen added "Isak" (which means "one who laughs" in Hebrew) to her maiden name, it was with a view to taking on the role of storyteller—a deliberate act of personal obliteration. The hallmark of Isak Dinesen's narrative art is a serene indifference to both happiness and misery, and every condition between the two. Life, according to this asexual tale-bearer, is of necessity tragicomic. The Karen Blixen who wrote these letters from Africa to her family in Denmark is a passionate and argumentative woman of many and varied moods; a questioner; a fighter. To talk of her in terms of serenity and detachment would be nonsensical….

Out of Africa is a work of romance, a pastoral: it captures the essence of a feudal society that was doomed to vanish. It will be read when all the plodding, self-justifying memoirs of the colonists are long forgotten. Letters from Africa 1914–1931 supplies the background details, often pedestrian, which Karen Blixen took such pains to leave out of her masterpiece—the kind of details, in fact, with which most autobiographies are top-heavy….

The letters make one understand the depth of her need to turn herself into Isak Dinesen, to become—once and for all—a witty spectator of human affairs, whose greatest concern is with the business of writing….

The fascination of this book is not just in the rounded picture it provides of a vanished Africa, vivid though that is, but rather in the way it reveals the tormented landowner developing into the assured literary artist: the confusions of Karen Blixen become the fictional material for the "one who laughs". To appreciate these letters to the full, it is necessary to be acquainted not only with Out of Africa (in which both Farah, Blixen's Somali servant, and Kamante, her cook of genius, are unforgettably recreated), but with the neglected (neglected in Britain, alas) stories of Isak Dinesen. One in particular deserves mentioning—"The Dreamers" from Seven Gothic Tales, in which the famous operatic soprano Pellegrina Leoni loses her voice irretrievably during a performance of Don Giovanni. "The Dreamers" is a completely achieved fiction, casting its own peculiar spell, yet it does exhibit definite resemblances to Karen Blixen's fated African life. The failure of her farm was like a mortal blow to her, as terrible as the singer's loss of her dazzling gift. Pellegrina tells her closest friend and devoted admirer to inform the world that she has died, and Karen Blixen writes to the ever loyal Thomas at the peak of her unhappiness to say that it is a dead woman who will be returning to Denmark. Pellegrina elects to become an enchantress, as her creator did: "I will be always many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much." It is the business of true storytellers to be many persons, whom they will into life by means of artifice: Karen Blixen was in her mid-forties when she began, in earnest, to employ those means.

Isak Dinesen's shrewdest and most sympathetic critic, Robert Langbaum [see excerpt above], has praised her for her rare ability to objectify a character's inner persona in terms of plot and action: introspection and analysis are very seldom allowed to interrupt and slacken the narrative. Her abandonment of the psychological method was the deliberate act of a writer of highly sophisticated intelligence—for, as the letters display, she could analyse and dissect and worry over people's motives for behaving as they do with a properly human concern. Her stories respect that concern in the reader, so that explication is unnecessary: this absorber of the Greek myths and the Norse sagas knew that she could put her faith in the deed itself….

The least satisfying aspect of the letters is, paradoxically, the one in which literature is discussed. Galsworthy, and yet again Galsworthy—has The Forsyte Saga ever been examined at such length? That limitlessly drab work is afforded the attention only masterpieces merit…. Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot and Proust are not read, it seems, in the smart circles of Nairobi. Blixen acknowledges her indebtedness to Hans Christian Andersen and to the Jewish novelist Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, whose work is virtually unknown outside Denmark, but otherwise there is little about the major influences on her own writing. Some stray snippets tantalize, like the few notably observant thoughts on Dickens, which make one wish that she had looked more often at the incontestably great. She places Dickens with Shake-speare and Chaucer as the celebrator of a vital Englishness. His sympathy with the eccentric and outcast, she argues, more than compensates for the lip-service he pays the middle classes and their stifling morality, which are personified for her by Britain's dull Hanoverian Queen, Victoria.

It is no wonder that so many of Isak Dinesen's stories are set at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, with the collapse of the old order, the ancien régime. Karen Blixen's political views are not always easy to follow, but they are surprisingly republican. This unashamed aristocrat despises the English for their besottedness with the monarchy. She seems to favour the idea of revolution, which fits uneasily with her hatred for all things bourgeois. She has a Romantic notion that there are true aristocrats of the spirit, among whom are many of the black Africans whose love and respect she never lost. She was, I suppose, essentially a feudalist—but of an unconventional kind. A feudalist and a feminist—it is a strikingly odd combination.