Cover

About the Author

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

SHADOWS ON THE GRASS

Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark, in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.

Although she had written occasional contributions to Danish periodicals since 1905 (under the nom de plume of Osceola), her real début took place in 1934 with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales, written in English under her pen-name. In 1937 she published, under her own name, Out of Africa (Penguin, 1954), an autobiographical account of the many years she spent in Kenya, the story of which she continues here. Most of her subsequent books were published in English and Danish simultaneously, including Winter’s Tales (1942) and The Angelic Avengers (1947), under the name of Pierre Andrezel. Among her other collections of stories are Last Tales (1957), Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) and Ehrengard (1963). All these books are published by Penguin.

Baroness Blixen died in Rungsted in 1962.

Isak Dinesen

(Karen Blixen)

Shadows on the Grass

Penguin Books

Illustrations

Kikuyu Ndito from the Ngong farm

(portrait by the author)

The author and her Scotch deerhound, Dusk, in the garden at Ngong, 1919

Aweru, an old Kikuyu squatter of the farm

(portrait by the author)

Abdullahi

(portrait by the author)

Farah

As here, after twenty-five years, I again take up episodes of my life in Africa, one figure, straight, candid, and very fine to look at, stands as doorkeeper to all of them: my Somali servant Farah Aden. Were any reader to object that I might choose a character of greater importance, I should answer him that that would not be possible.

Farah came to meet me in Aden in 1913, before the First World War. For almost eighteen years he ran my house, my stables and safaris. I talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew of all that I did or thought. Farah, by the time I had had to give up the farm and was leaving Africa, saw me off in Mombasa. And as I watched his dark immovable figure on the quay growing smaller and at last disappear, I felt it as if I were losing a part of myself, as if I were having my right hand set off, and from now on would never again ride a horse or shoot with a rifle, nor be able to write otherwise than with my left hand. Neither have I since then ridden or shot.