The three novels under consideration have nothing in common but their eligibility to lie side by side on the fiction table of a bookstore, yet they are worth discussing together for contrast alone. Each is worth knowing, entertaining, readable. To take them in order of impact:
The German novelist Gertrud von LeFort is not well known here, though she is as firm a traditionalist as Isak Dinesen, who is, and with whom she might share a reputation. We are apt to note immediately that the Baroness LeFort has the confident, old-fashioned skill and Gothic atmosphere of Isak Dinesen; the truth is that Isak Dinesen has these things from the Baroness LeFort. Her writing is aristocratic, direct, of a steely hardness and flexibility. The four novellas which Isabel and Florence McHugh have translated are sharply differentiated in tone and matter; each, however, is about the soul’s dilemma before a duty to God and a duty to love and the discovery that the two are interlocked, indeed, integral.
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