Seven Gothic Tales (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Dinesen, Isak

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141187190 ISBN 13: 9780141187198

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2002

Synopsis

Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar.

Proclaimed a masterpiece on its publication in 1934, this collection is shot through with themes of love and desire - from the maiden lady who now believes herself to have been the grand courtesan of her time, to the Count whose wife is so jealous that she cannot bear him to admire her jewels, and Lincoln Forsner, an Englishman whose search for a woman he met in a brothel leads him into many strange adventures.

About this title

Review:

"These tales are a modern refinement of German romanticism. ...They are peopled, or haunted, by ghosts of a past age, voluptuaries dreaming of the singers and ballerinas of the operas of Mozart and Gluck, young men who are too melancholy to enjoy love or too perverse to profit by it, maidens dedicated to chastity and others hopeful of a gentlemanly seduction; their generally fantastic adventures are exquisitely played."

-- The New York Times

"[Seven Gothic Tales is] in that special realm in which artistry is more real than reality" -- Time

About the Author:

ISAK DINESEN was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.

Although she had written occasional contributions to Danish periodicals since 1905 (under the nom de plume of Osceola), her real début took place in 1934 with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales, written in English under her pen-name. Out of Africa (1937) is an autobiographical account of the years she spent in Kenya. Most of her subsequent books were published in English and Danish simultaneously, including Winter’s Tales (1942) and The Angelic Avengers (1946), under the name of Pierre Andrézol. Among her other collections of stories are Last Tales (1957), Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), Shadows on the Grass (1960) and Ehrengard (1963). All of these books are published by Penguin.

Baroness Blixen died in Rungsted in 1962.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0141187190
• ISBN 13: 9780141187198
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368