[Carnival, Entertainments and Posthumous Tales] are of a piece with her already published works. But, since they are the last we shall have of Dinesen, certain observations come to mind about her and her art. All has probably been said already; yet we cannot leave it at that. She is too good a writer.

It is striking, for example, how at home Dinesen was in the past. In this volume, the stories go back and forth between Holland, Italy and France in the early 19th Century to Denmark and England in the 20th. Why the past? Because, of course, the past lends itself to strange happenings and odd personages. And also to violent passions. Dinesen was, in many respects, a true Romantic.

Yet in Dinesen, paradoxically, there is a kind of old-fashionedness in the modern tales and a timelessness in the tales of the past. One realizes that...