SOURCE: "Isak Dinesen: An Appreciation," in The Southern Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, March, 1966, pp. 297-314.

Lewis is a novelist, poet, editor, educator, and librettist. In the following essay, she discusses Out of Africa and the short stories in Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, and Last Tales, noting the thematic and stylistic differences between Dinesen's fiction and nonfiction.

When you have read Out of Africa you will have learned a great deal about Isak Dinesen. There remains a certain amount of mystery, however. She centers her attention on the African aspects of the farm. Even the account of that down-at-the-heels, fugitive actor Emmanuelson, which seems at first to be an episode concerning the Baroness and her European guest, turns out to be primarily a comment on the Masai, those natives who were at once both aristocrat and proletarian, and therefore capable of recognizing and sympathizing with tragedy. But, although the...