As a result, the relationship between her life and works has been the subject of considerable attention, including many memoirs and biographies. Relatives and friends, scholars and critics have all sought to offer the "true" picture of Karen Blixen's life and persona. Four volumes of selected letters, which document her entire adult life, have been published posthumously. Studies published in the 1980s and 1990s reveal that the relationship between this author's life and works continues to be the subject of intense critical inquiry and revisionism.
Blixen's works are the literary expressions of her views on art, nature, and identity. She drew much of her philosophy from the nineteenth-century Romantic school of writers, who believed that man in his most godlike form has a strong connection to nature and that the primitive and the aristocrat share an innate creativity or intuitiveness. She was also inspired by Søren Kierkegaard, who was skeptical of established religion and thus saw man as isolated in his relation to God. She also admired Friedrich Nietzsche as a poet; her aesthetics--not least her use of parody--bear a remarkable likeness to his ideals. Raised as a Unitarian, Dinesen rejected the dualism of the Protestant tradition, but she was well versed in the Bible, and many witty reinterpretations of events of the Old and New Testaments occur in her tales.
