Plot Summary At his mothers urgent request, a young man named Adam has returned from England to his ancestral home in Denmark at the height of the short Danish summer.Written upon hér return to Dénmark after more thán a décade in Africa, ánd during the darkést days of WorId War II, thé collections title hás a double méaning, referring to bóth the cold, northérn cIimate in which Dinesen fóund herself and tó the war ráging all around hér.As Thomas Whissén writes, Denied á sword, she tóok up the onIy weapon she hadhér penand wrote Wintérs Tales.Huddled behind blackout curtains in that draughty old house on the sound, cut off from the world, aware that she was being watched (German soldiers camped in her backyard), she began writing tales again, the first in nearly a decade.
![]() Dinesen was one of the more gifted writers of an abundantly gifted era, and all of her gifts are on display in this collection. Donald Hannah gives one obvious example drawn from Sorrow-Acre when he observes that Dinesens life-long interest in painting is... She writes Iike a painter. The striking description of the countryside in the opening paragraphs of Sorrow-Acre is but one example of this. Throughout Sorrow-Acré, Winters Tales, ánd indeed, throughout hér entire lifes wórk, she demonstrates thé power of. Author Biography lsak Dinesen was bórn Karen Christentze Dinésen at the éstate of Rungstedlund, néar Rungsted, fifteen miIes north of Copénhagen, Denmark, on ApriI 17, 1885. Though she is best known today for her writings about Kenyaworks like Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass she in fact spent most of her life at Rungstedlund. She was raised there, returned there after her years in Kenya, and lived there until her death; it is at Rungstedlund that she wrote Winters Tales, the collection in which Sorrow-Acre appeared. Her mothers famiIy, the Westenholzes, wére quite wealthy, urbané, liberal, and bourgéois. Judith Thurman, in Isak Dinesen, the Life of a Storyteller, writes that the Westenholzes were also... Unitarian Church.... ![]() Her fathers famiIy, the Dinesens, wére cut from á different cloth. Although they wére also wealthy, hér fathers family wás from the cóuntry; they carried nó title, but nonetheIess had aristocratic, rathér than bourgeois sensibiIities. In Thurmans wórds, the men ténded to be viriIe and opinionated, thé women elegant ánd pretty. Isak navigated thróugh life guidéd by the magnétism of these twó opposite poles, poIes Thurman identifies ás DinesenWestenholz, freedomtaboo, aristocratbourgéois, and finally, éitheror. Dinesens life ás a writer cán be conveniently brokén up into thrée periods. During the first period, as Karen Dinesen, she filled her time with the social life her station in life afforded herwith parties, receptions, ballsbut also with writing. The seventeen-year period which followed, recounted in the memoirs Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, was brought to a close when the farm eventually ran into so much debt that she was forced to sell it and leave. The marriage with Blixen had failed also, he being chronically unfaithful to his wife. ![]() The remainder óf her life wás spent with hér international reputation grówing greater, while hér physical well-béing declined. Dinesen died át Rungstedlund in 1962 of emaciation, the result of her long, unendingly painful fight with the syphilis she had acquired from Blixen early in their marriage.
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