[Isak Dinesen's] literary career falls into three distinct periods. There is the first, spectacular period, represented by her first three books—Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Out of Africa (1937), Winter's Tales (1942)—in which she appeared as a fully matured artist and made the reputation she has today, for her reputation still rests on her first three books. There is the long hiatus of fifteen years during which her only book was the novel, The Angelic Avengers, a thriller which she published in 1946 under the name of Pierre Andrézel, and which she was not for many years willing to acknowledge. There is the third period of recrudescence, remarkable for a writer in her seventies, which saw in rapid succession two volumes of stories, Last Tales in 1957 and Anecdotes of Destiny in 1958, a collection in 1961 of four more African reminiscences, Shadows on the Grass, and the posthumously published story Ehrengard in 1963….
The books of 1957 to 1961 do not make any advance in thought or technique on her first three—development is not to be expected of a writer who published her first book at forty-nine—but they do perfect and complete the thought and technique of the earlier books. The amazing thing is that the last books do in so many places come up to the best of her earlier achievements. They have not to be sure the bite and passion, the shocking extravagance of the never-equalled Seven Gothic Tales, but she did not want to reproduce the quality of that book. She spoke of it with embarrassment as "too elaborate" and as having "too much of the author" in it. She revealed her aims by preferring Winter's Tales, because it is "simpler, more sober."… (p. 44)
