SOURCE: Knafo-Setton, Ruth. “The Dream World of Isak Dinesen.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 10 (spring 1988): 83-91.

In the following essay, Knafo-Setton discusses the imaginative stories collected in Seven Gothic Tales, asserting that the volume contains “all her major themes and strengths without heavily indulging in her weaknesses which become more apparent in the later tales.”

Shrouded in mystery, Isak Dinesen entered the literary world which she then confounded as the timeless seer of an age of transition. Paradox is her very nature. She wrote two kinds of books: detached, gentle and unique reminiscences of her life as a coffee-plantation owner in Kenya (Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass), and the four books of tales, wild and grotesque, tragically striving for an impossible classical unity. She stands on the lonely threshold of modernism and the nouveau roman, clutching desperately to the vanishing ideal she...