Isak Dinesen - (1885 - 1962)

Devastated by her loss, she travels through Europe, constantly changing her identity and taking on a series of lovers. Out of Africa presents Dinesen's experiences as a British coffee plantation owner in East Africa, documenting her relationship with the Africans who lived and worked on and around her plantation, her divorce from Baron Blixen, her affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, and the failure of her coffee enterprise. The short stories in Winter's Tales (1942), with their simpler narrative style and attention to landscape, history, and life of Denmark, solidified Dinesen's standing in the Danish literary community. "Sorrow-Acre" is based on a medieval Danish folktale and is set in eighteenth-century Denmark. The story examines the inevitable social consequences of the master-servant relationship: how aristocratic values and traditions govern the attitudes and actions of a landlord toward a thieving serf and his mother. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Dinesen wrote The Angelic Avengers (1946), a mystery-thriller about two orphaned girls. The manuscript was smuggled out of Denmark and published under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. Dinesen continually denied authorship of the book, however, because she was unsatisfied with its literary quality.