In the following essay, Hannah examines Dinesen's major works—the autobiography Out of Africa and several of the short stories—focusing on their depiction of the past and evocation of nostalgia.

In the following excerpt from an essay in which he discusses both Out of Africa and Saul Friedänder's memoir of the Holocaust, When Memory Comes (1978), Foster examines the ways in which Dinesen's autobiographical persona represents an amalgamation of the cultures she experienced: her native Danish culture, the British colonial culture in East Africa, and the native African cultures.

"I have always thought that I would have cut a figure at the time of the plague of Florence." This quotation from Out of Africa … suggests the kind of role that Isak Dinesen has conceived for herself. Like Selma Lagerlöf, who liked to regard her audience as children listening to stories, Isak Dinesen has always imagined herself in the classic role of the storyteller, as a modern Scheherazade. Her tales are so imbued with the spirit of storytelling that one might venture to assert...

In the following review, Woods enthusiastically praises Out of Africa.

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 mot...