Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Eudora Welty reviewed Isak Dinesen's 1957 Last Tales and two scholarly studies of the Danish writer's oeuvre for the New York Times Book Review. She read, and passed on to William Maxwell, Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes of My Life," and she also contributed to a memorial tribute for Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) in 1965. These commentaries are part of Welty's oeuvre and have been reprinted and made available to readers and scholars. Until 2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. Recently, however, I learned that in 1938 Welty had reviewed Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa in her hometown paper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger.¹ In her review, Welty also acknowledges having read Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book. By 1938, when she first reviewed Dinesen's work, Welty had traveled throughout Mississippi for her five months as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and had had one photography exhibit in the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery and two photography exhibits in New York City. She had published eleven short stories in truly "little" magazines and had written and burned the first version of "Petrified Man." Edward O'Brien had reprinted "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in his edition of The Best Short Stories of 1938. Welty was eighteen months away from receiving Diarmuid Russell's invitation to be her primary reader and agent. She was years away from writing a novel, and nearly a half-century would pass before she would write her own memoir.

To write a book review is to read closely and then to think, almost from afar, of which details and which impressions to gather and share. To review Out of Africa, the second book by Dinesen, Welty begins by commenting that "'Seven Gothic Tales' appeared several years ago under the name Isak Dinesen. It was a widely read book of ornate, metaphysical stories designed carefully and with a sharp obviously feminine humor, to delight and tantalize the reader who likes curious and unreal things" (1). This brief summary of Dinesen's first book illustrates, most importantly, that Welty had read Seven Gothic Tales prior to writing her Out of Africa review, and, in addressing the "reader who likes curious and unreal things," she begins the habit of reviewing from a reader's perspective—a point of view she maintains in nearly all of her book reviews.

The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. This first collection of Dinesen's tales was an April Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for April, May, June, and July of 1934. The book is a complex exploration of the Gothic: sudden dark, stormy, windy weather causing drastic consequences; ancient worlds bearing down on the present through elaborate allusions; corporeal ghosts and shadowy people; unexpected, fantastic events; death; strange visages and bodies; and riddles posed to the characters and readers. Dinesen asks, "'What is it,' she said very slowly, in the manner of a sibylla, 'which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?'" (Seven 115).²

Peter Monro Jack reviewed Seven Gothic Tales in the New York Times Book Review under the headline "A Strange Book for Our Time." Jack found the tales "curious" with an "almost Proustian sensibility that illuminates, by refining, the romantic mood." Citing that Dinesen's "pattern is as flexible as Scheherazade's," Jack asserts that Dinesen's "inventiveness is apparently inexhaustible," and he concludes, "This is a work of the imagination, very subtle and graceful; a rare and curious book, it will be white magic to many and mere mummery to others … though both are in the book, there is more magic than mummery" (6). This evaluation, I believe, would...