'Baroness Blixen is as cool and delicious as a sea breeze in the desert. These stories are entirely individual, with only a far-off exquisite flavour of Hans Andersen and Conrad' - Philip Toynbee
If one theme unifies these eleven tales, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenta and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they derive their themes and locales from Isak Dinesen's childhood in Denmark. Luminous, introspective, full of 'bottomless wisdom' and poetic feeling, they were the author's own favourite work.
'Baroness Blixen appears to be in direct descent from the Heidelberg Gothic, so that in cast of romantic imagination her family tree spreads far and wide. Hers is a distinctive and charming cultivation of mind, her fancy is delightfully overlaid by Scandinavian legend and landscape... The originality of her stories in this volume proceeds from an astonishing and wholly unexpected sympathy with their powers of romantic phantasmagoria' - The Times Literary Supplement
