Isak Dinesen was born Karen Christentze Dinesen at the estate ofRungstedlund, near Rungsted, fifteen miles north of Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 17, 1885. Though she is best known today for her writings about Kenya-works like Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass-she in fact spent most of her life at Rungstedlund. She was raised there, returned there after her years in Kenya, and lived there until her death; it is at Rungstedlund that she wrote Winter's Tales, the collection in which "Sorrow-Acre" appeared.

Dinesen's parents were from two very different walks of life. Her mother's family, the Westenholzes, were quite wealthy, urbane, liberal, and bourgeois. Judith Thunnan, in Isak Dinesen, the Life of a Storyteller, writes that the Westenholzes "were also. . . passionate feminists and nonconformists, converts to the Unitarian Church. . . . Their energies went into practical or abstract projects, and mostly to their own moral excellence." Her...