According to his official website and correspondence in the Archive cited by Gillen, Pinter's screen adaptation was commissioned by actress Julia Ormond, who wanted to produce and to direct a film of this work: Julia Ormond commissioned this Pinter screenplay -- a 19th-century tale of a mother's failure to love her adopted child -- as part of her 20th Century Fox development deal as producer/director.
Billington summarizes Blixen's story in some detail, stating that it concerns a slum child, Jens, who is endowed awith an extra-sensory imaginative power.
Adopted by the wealthy but childless Jakob and Emilie, Jens emobodies a totality of vision: he is both instinctively at home in the grand house and yet retains vivid memories of his slum origins.
But Blixen, who married her baronial cousin and later lived on a Kenyan coffee plantation"—made famous in the 1985 film adaptation of her memoir Out of Africa, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford—"clings to a conservative belief in fate."
Extending Gillen's perspective, Billington argues that "Pinter enriches the story by heightening its social context; and, in so doing, he demolishes the convenient myth that his political fervour has somehow diluted the art" (398–99).