ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses primarily on the writing of white settler women as they chart their families' attempts to create a version of Isak Dinesen's mythic farm in the colonies of East and Southern Africa. These works often straddle the boundary between memoir and fiction and run the gamut from the triumphantly racist Annie Martin's Home Life on an Ostrich Farm to the resignedly sensitive Alyse Simpson's The Land that Never Was. Similarly, Isak Dinesen publishes Out of Africa in 1937, six years after losing the Karen Coffee Estate, while Shadows on the Grass is the last book published in her lifetime, thirty years after leaving Kenya. Thomas Hibbs suggests that "Babette's Feast argues for a sacramental union of matter and spirit, human and divine". The cannibalism that hovers over the end of "Babette's Feast" is a sacrifice to colonial capital. Elspeth Huxley wrote over thirty-five books between the years 1937 and 1993.