The Pearls

Karen Blixen

The Pearls

«She had lived in Denmark, and for a year in a pension in Lübeck, and her idea of the earth was that it must spread out horizontally, flat or undulating, before her feet. But in these mountains, everything seemed strangely to stand up vertically, like some great animal that rises on its hind legs, – and you know not whether it is to play, or to crush you.»

During their honeymoon to Norway, Jensine makes several disheartening realisations about her husband, Alexander. Combined with the rumours of war spreading in the newspapers, Jensine begins to ponder what the future will bring. Her worries flow over: she accidentally snaps her pearl necklace, a family heirloom…

Biography

Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke (born: Dinesen; 1885-1962) was a Danish author and Baroness and one of Denmark’s major literary figures. Her reputation was established initially in the United States with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales in 1934. Marrying into nobility, the couple went to Kenya where she managed a coffee plantation. Her experiences of those seventeen years were recorded in the highly regarded memoir Out of Africa (1937), an adaptation of which won several Oscars in 1985. In Denmark, Blixen is renowned for her highly polished tales, which she initially wrote in English under the pen name Isak Dinesen and subsequently translated into Danish herself. Much has been written about Blixen’s life and work, and in the collective consciousness she still figures as a literary superstar of international calibre, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. She spent most of her life at Rungstedlund where she was born, and also died.

The Pearls is part of the short story collection Winter’s Tales (1942).