For Peter Matthiessen the setting is the subject; for Isak Dinesen [in her Letters From Africa, 1914–1931] it is an intermittent background. Letters from Africa but not, in proportion to the total, letters about Africa: written during the first ferment of modernism between the outbreak of World War I and the onset of a world depression, they conspicuously engage the "advanced" issues of a changing society in which Isak Dinesen was not then living, for which at heart she had little respect but which she felt compelled, for reasons of personal discomfort, to analyze, evaluate, explain or explain away. While we cannot doubt her deepening affection for the outpost country she learned to live in, fortified by her status of a benevolent imperialist in a small way, our dominant impression, from these letters, is not of a chronicle of safaris and farm management in British East Africa but rather of a collection of didactic essays concerned, for the greater part, with the role of women in a world of moral upheaval, with the character of nationality and race as she changeably observed its representatives in Kenya, and with a variety of ethical premises inspired by her reading…. (p. 625)

These are not among the memorable letters of our time; they have not the effortless manner that eases letters into literature. Except where she is gossiping about her black household or recounting the pleasures of safari, they are charmless; they have a one-way imperiousness that invites no answer….

They are in a certain sense sadly fascinating if you need to watch an artist in chrysalis dreaming, not that she's a butterfly but that she's George Bernard Shaw. For my taste, I would have welcomed more of the daily East African life. Dinesen is much more readable when watching the light go out in the eyes of a dying lion than when she is expounding a mystique she calls "homogenous sex" or when she is explaining why she finds The Forsyte Saga detestable. And her parenthetical accounts of a condition no doubt commonplace in Africa—the omnipresence of death—are often enthralling. Finding a small strange boy sitting in the dark, miles from anywhere, tired out and with damaged feet, she drives him to the hospital, and notes almost casually: "If we had not picked him up, the hyenas would have got him during the night." (p. 627)