'Dinesen delighted in paradox,' one critic writes, 'in creating endings to her tales that were equally poised between opposite intentions without the linguistic details to suggest where the balance was meant to be heaviest.' Or, as one of her narrators remarks, 'it is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it'. Written mostly between the 1920s and 1960s (she died in 1962) and always set in the 19th century or before, they are involute creations, packed tightly with mysteries and potential interpretations: readers have to work to detect their full meaning. They form a bridge between the Thousand and One Nights, Grimm, Andersen and the metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Her stories utilise myth, enchantment and the lurid subject matter of the gothic (incest, murder, witchcraft) to explore philosophy, morality and questions of identity.

She made no secret of her identity, but preferred to publish using her father's surname. Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, a Dane who wrote nearly all her fiction in English. In her memoir, Out of Africa, which is arranged much like a series of short stories, she reaches back to Boccaccio when she writes: 'I have always thought I might have cut a figure at the time of the plague of Florence.' She chose this identity carefully: it is one that seams her work. She might be Dorothea Viehmann, the storyteller who provided the Grimms with a valuable cache of fairy tales, or one of the many nameless women who for centuries circulated tales in spinning rooms, nurseries, and before family hearths. My paperback copy of the 1957 collection Last Tales bears a portrait of Isak Dinesen wearing a hooded cape.

The dreamers isak dinesen