The first thing that needs to be said about this exceptional volume of letters [Letters from Africa 1914–1931] is that it has been attributed to the wrong author. "Isak Dinesen" did not come into being until 1934, almost three years after Karen Blixen had left Africa in the harrowing circumstances that inform the book's closing pages. It's worth making the distinction, if only because the distinction was of such prime importance to its originator: when Karen Blixen added "Isak" (which means "one who laughs" in Hebrew) to her maiden name, it was with a view to taking on the role of storyteller—a deliberate act of personal obliteration. The hallmark of Isak Dinesen's narrative art is a serene indifference to both happiness and misery, and every condition between the two. Life, according to this asexual tale-bearer, is of necessity tragicomic. The Karen Blixen who wrote these letters from Africa to her family in Denmark is a passionate and argumentative woman of many and varied moods; a questioner; a fighter. To talk of her in terms of serenity and detachment would be nonsensical….
Out of Africa is a work of romance, a pastoral: it captures the essence of a feudal society that was doomed to vanish. It will be read when all the plodding, self-justifying memoirs of the colonists are long forgotten. Letters from Africa 1914–1931 supplies the background details, often pedestrian, which Karen Blixen took such pains to leave out of her masterpiece—the kind of details, in fact, with which most autobiographies are top-heavy….
