Storytelling versus Novel Writing

Isak Dinesen was a storyteller, not a novelist. She could write novels and had one published under a pen name, but she did not take the form seriously. Her great literature always had the form of stories of limited length. They could be considered the short story form or novella if longer and more intricate. In her later years, she took on a very ambitious novel with more than one hundred characters but did not finish it before she died.

She began creating her stories while still in childhood and adolescence. Many of them were told over and over verbally, which became a refining process. She also kept them in her mind and revised them in the imagination before ever attempting to write them out and publish.

Because her stories were so much a part of her, she could recite them verbatim when performing for...