Twenty years after her death in 1962, the interest continues in Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym for the Danish Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote almost all her major work in English). In this country all her books are in print; and there appeared last year the English translation of her Letters from Africa 1914-1931, which fills in the gaps in her idealized memoir, Out of Africa, (1937), that minor prose classic of our time. Now, in Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, Judith Thurman gives us the second full-scale biography in English of this unusual writer.[1]
Thurman’s book is a model of what, a literary biography should be; for it is well-researched, but the facts are all absorbed into large patterns of understanding, into a brisk narrative, psychologically profound characterizations, and vivid portrayals of Karen Blixen’s Danish and African environments. Thurman has a delicate way of relating the author’s life to her stories, of giving biographical readings of the stories that are appropriate to a biography but that do not violate our own non-biographical readings. This biography is as readable as a good novel; indeed, few novelists nowadays would have the imagination or courage to invent so fantastic a life and personality as Karen Blixen’s.
The first biography, Titania, by Parmenia Migel (1967), gave us much valuable new information. Migel informed us that the young Karen Dinesen (Tanne, as her family called her) fell in love with her future husband’s twin brother,
