Karen Blixen adopted a very free approach to the traditional Gothic genre, but she worked within a number of its parameters. “Some of the foremost Anglo-Saxon authors of 19th century had written Gothic tales and novels: Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner – all of whom feature in Karen Blixen’s private library. I am a storyteller … ”Ĭommenting on the designation of these tales as gothic, the Karen Blixen Museum offers this insight:
I belong to the ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who, for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which, in some way or another, has satisfied them. Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales … “Reality had met me … in such an ugly shape, that I have no wish to come into contact with it again. S torytelling is actually a part of some of her stories - that is, stories are told within the stories and characters are sometimes archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out people. It set the stage for the thematic character of her fiction, which was an amalgam of the real and the mythic, and incorporating elements of Persian and West Indian exotica. Seven Gothic Tales was a surprise success in the U.S., even becoming a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.
A surprise success by a Danish author in the U.S. In 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, a collection of stories she had written in English, was published. Upon her return to her home country, she began writing in earnest. Karen Christenze Dinesen was the author’s original name, and she was known as Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, or simply Karen Blixen, during her disastrous marriage. In 1931, the plantation’s fortunes collapsed, and she returned to her family home in Denmark from Kenya. Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (1885 – 1962) is a masterful collection of short stories by the Danish author best known for Out of Africa (1937), a now-controversial memoir of her life as a coffee plantation owner in the colonized Kenya of the 1920s.
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