LAST TALES

London: Putnam, 1957. First edition. 8vo, publisher’s original black cloth in dustjacket. 405. A fine copy. A FINE COPY OF THIS BRILLIANT WORK. Isak Dinesen, pseudonym for the Baroness Karen Blixen, was a Danish writer who wrote mainly in English and early on rejected bourgeois Danish society in favor of studying art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome. She married her cousin in 1914 and the two of them moved to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. The two of them lived there until they divorced in 1925, after which she managed the plantation alone. Financial diffculties forced her to return to Denmark in 1931. She brought her lifelong passion for writing to fruition in 1934 with her first major work SEVEN GOTHIC TALES, a macabre and bizarre collection of neo-Gothic fantasy stories. A number of works followed, including her most well-known OUT OF AFRICA in 1937, an account of her experiences at her and her husband’s failed Kenyan plantation. LAST TALES comes when Dinesen is in her seventies after a fifteen year hiatus from writing fiction, and “with undiminished technical skill, renewed the exploration of the themes of imagination and design, of desire, and of destiny” (FCLE, 296). The collection includes a sequence of stories about the fictional Cardinal Salviati, “the wisest and most brilliant raconteur in Rome during the 1840’s” as well as tales about a voiceless diva who reincarnates her voice in the throat of a boy and the trials of the noble Galen and Angel families. This volume also includes “The Blank Page” which has since sparked exciting feminist commentary bySusan Gubar and Christine Froula. A splendid copy.