Kate Baylay s superb illustrations reflect their ghoulish beauty. Written in the light of her changed fortunes and the First World War, these enigmatic tales express nostalgia for a time of innocence, while embracing the existence of tragedy and brutality. She left Kenya in 1931, when the plantation failed. Her experiences there, including the breakdown of her marriage and her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton, a big-game hunter who died in a plane crash, inspired her famous memoir. Her fate is unknown, but for a fantaisie macabre he has 15 years later Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885, moving to Kenya in 1914 to establish a coffee plantation with her husband, Baron Bror Blixen of Sweden. 'The Old Chevalier' tells a young man of a brief but haunting love affair with a girl who disappeared into the rainy streets of Paris as suddenly as she appeared to him. In The Monkey, a Virgin Prioress s attempts to unite her nephew with an unwilling bride become increasingly ruthless, until, at the story s gripping conclusion, a bizarre metamorphosis is revealed. In each, the line between reality and fantasy is eerily indistinct. Their settings, ranging from Pisa to Elsinore, echo the darkly alluring realms evoked by writers such as Mary Shelley. Each combines shrewd psychological insights with the elegant prose and supernatural themes of the 19th-century gothic tale.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) is best known for her autobiographical bestseller Out of Africa, but it was with these seven captivating stories that, as Margaret Atwood writes in her introduction, she first took America by storm. Captivating and darkly alluring, these brilliant short stories combine the supernatural themes of the gothic with shrewdly modern psychological insights.

Karen blixen seven gothic tales