SOURCE: "Witch as Quintessential Woman: A Context for Isak Dinesen's Fiction," in Mosaic, Vol. XVI, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 87-100.

Stambaugh is an educator, novelist, and critic whose works include The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen (1988). In the following essay, she examines Dinesen's "complex" relationship to feminism, drawing mainly on her letters published in Letters from Africa, 1914–1931.

In Isak Dinesen's "The Dreamers" Lincoln Forsner begins his tale of Pellegrina Leoni by saying, "You must take in whatever you can, and leave the rest outside. It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it." The major approaches to Dinesen's work so far, I think, have taken in "only half of it"; by focusing upon esthetic issues, critics have overlooked the fact that her subject is almost always the role of women. Eric Johannesson perceived it when he observed...