By the time "The Ring" appeared in Anecdotes of Destiny, the critical judgment on Dinesen had long since fully registered, and whatever controversy her stubborn art had earlier generated had become the mere expert background to her work. Critics who wrote about her did so mostly from a stance of approval, and those who disapproved—the ascendant Marxist school, for example—tended to ignore her. Judith Thurman in Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1982) summarizes the initial critical reaction in Denmark to Dinesen's fiction this way: "Many readers were offended by Karen Blixen's frank nostalgia for the ancien regime and by her flight from the grim realities of Danish life. There was also some resentment over the fact that she had written originally in English and had had her first success in America."

After the Second World War, Danish writers began to reassess...