Seven Gothic Tales

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’. Each combines shrewd psychological insights with the elegant prose and supernatural themes of the 19th-century gothic tale. Their settings, ranging from Pisa to Elsinore, echo the darkly alluring realms evoked by writers such as Mary Shelley. In each, the line between reality and fantasy is eerily indistinct. 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. '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. Her fate is unknown, but for a fantaisie macabre he has 15 years later …