A professor of English at City College of New York-Queen's College, Richter is the author of Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction and Ten Short Novels. In the following essay, he discusses what he calls the "covert plot" of "Sorrow-Acre, " stating that Dinesen encrypted the secret meaning into her story in a gesture of cultural elitism

Perhaps none of Isak Dinesen's novellas has been more ad1nired, and certainly none has been more widely anthologized, than "Sorrow-Acre,". originally published with her Winter's Tales in 1942. This lyrically tragic tale, set in Denmark in the 1770s, invokes many of the persistent themes that haunt Dinesen's work: the contrast between the cruel beauty of the ancien regime and the more prosaic humanitarian ethos of modem democracy that will inevitably displace it; the inextricable connections between men and the land they live on; the arcane routes by which men...