Book description
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit
the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately
interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a
dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar. Proclaimed a masterpiece on its
publication in 1934, this collection is shot through with themes of love
and desire - from the maiden lady who now believes herself to have been
the grand courtesan of her time, to the Count whose wife is so jealous
that she cannot bear him to admire her jewels, and Lincoln Forsner, an
Englishman whose search for a woman he met in a brothel leads him into
many strange adventures.
ISAK DINESEN was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in
Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and
Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914.
Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their
divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse
in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.
Although she had written occasional contributions to Danish
periodicals since 1905 (under the nom de plume of Osceola), her
real d but took place in 1934 with the publication of Seven Gothic
Tales, written in English under her pen-name. Out of Africa
(1937) is an autobiographical account of the years she spent in Kenya.
Most of her subsequent books were published in English and Danish
simultaneously, including Winter s Tales (1942) and The
Angelic Avengers (1946), under the name of Pierre Andr zol.
Among her other collections of stories are Last Tales (1957),
Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), Shadows on the Grass
(1960) and Ehrengard (1963). All of these books are published
by Penguin.
Baroness Blixen died in Rungsted in 1962.
