When I came back from Africa in 1931, after living there since 1914, I had lost all the money I had when I married because the coffee plantation didn’t pay, you know I asked my brother to finance me for two years while I prepared Seven Gothic Tales, and I told him that at the end of two years I’d be on my own.
Yes, I shall never forget that took me in at once. The anecdote that (Danish) Dinesen tells about their publication in this 1954 interview from the Paris Review gives a sense of how she skims across time and space, suddenly lighting somewhere quite particular: These tales have twists rather than “acts” only two impose formal divisions on the unfolding narrative. There is space, in these stories, to turn, or, as we say of plot-to twist. They move subtly, nimbly, are even (help me) panther-like in their stretching and lounging and stalking and in their silent, decisive leaps. And here I find how wrong I am to generalize: the long-short-story or “tale” seems to have been created for these stories, which are stories in the highest sense, possessing both one-thing-after-anotherness and a coherence of theme and language-and do not fall into the trap of either having a point or not having a point. This may not be to all as it is to me: If, as an English professor, I am grateful to be able to assign George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in private life I contemn a form that is often too long to be short and too short to be satisfying. The worst thing to be said of the tales by a reader of my prejudices, and it had better be said at once, is that they are long short stories or short novellas (six of the seven are over fifty pages long, and two of these are more than eighty pages long). Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe. Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by “one of the finest and most singular artists of our time” ( The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Seven Gothic Tales is a set of enchanting stories in late-modernist prose by Isak Dinesen. An experiment with the form of the nineteenth-century-style review: mega-long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
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