Isak Dinesen's "Letters from Africa, 1914–1931" … is the raw material from which the author quarried her world-famous memoir "Out of Africa," published in 1938. Reserved, stoic, and tactful, that work gave little hint of its author's painful private life, and its admirably pure and exact prose produces an effect of self-possession and self-sufficiency. The letters, an unconscious—and unself-conscious—self-portrait, were written to her mother, her brother Thomas, her Aunt Bess, and her sister Ellen, and their spontaneity reproduces the reality of the author's life in Kenya: struggle, anxiety, loneliness, with intermittent periods of elation. The letters demonstrate her culture and her intimate involvement with art, literature, and ideas—particularly social thought about the role of women—and they share with the memoir a passion for Africa, its landscape, its peoples, its plants, and its wildlife. (p. 120)
When these letters close, their author, at the age of forty-six, is returning to live as a dependent on her mother—a failure in her own eyes, with no formal profession, no husband, no lover, no child, no money, and ruined health. She had invested her ego in the lost plantation; two men she loved had both left her; and though she had written and painted, her record of publication and exhibition was scanty. She cannot have known that in writing "Seven Gothic Tales" and "Out of Africa"—two international best-sellers—she was about to find what she had been seeking in Africa: a recognized use for her abilities.
