A brief survey of the short story: Isak Dinesen

A Dane who wrote almost exclusively in English, Isak Dinesen used lurid subjects, including incest, murder and witchcraft, to explore philosophy, morality and questions of identity

• Chris Power - The Guardian, Tuesday 20 May 2014

Isak Dinesen in 1959, wearing a coat made from the skin of a leopard she killed in Africa. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

My paperback copy of the 1957 collection Last Tales bears a portrait of Isak Dinesen wearing a hooded cape. She might be Dorothea Viehmann, the storyteller who provided the Grimms with a valuable cache of fairy tales, or one of the many nameless women who for centuries circulated tales in spinning rooms, nurseries, and before family hearths. She chose this identity carefully: it is one that seams her work. In her memoir, Out of Africa, which is arranged much like a series of short stories, she reaches back to Boccaccio when she writes: "I have always thought I might have cut a figure at the time of the plague of Florence."
More