Anecdotes of Destiny, by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), (Penguin £6.99 in UK)

A late (1958) collection of stories including Babette's Feast, which now appears to "have become a modem film classic. There are, in all, five stories and those who are hypnotised by Karen Blixen's curiously gaunt, neo gothic, penumbral world should relish them all. I wonder, however, if in a less famous writer the critics would have been so tolerant of the mannered, slightly archaic style and of women characters who burst into a "storm of tears" or "wring their hands"? Or can it be that "Blixen/Dinesen is rather a cult writer, who is correspondingly overrated and kept on a pedestal with the sign "Hands Off"?