The Fox

I read D.H. Lawrence’s greatly revered Lady Chatterley’s Lover quite a few years ago and I wasn’t that impressed.  It’s one of those novels that became so famous because it’s important rather than good- yes, it was one of the first books to deal with female sexuality, but it didn’t do it all that well.  The Fox, in comparison to this, is a slick little underrated novel (if at 65 pages it even earns that title at all).

The Fox tells the story of Nellie March and Jill Banford and their attempts to run a small farm in post-World War One England.  These attempts are scuppered throughout by a fox, a young soldier and generally not being all that good at farming.  But it is the soldier, Henry Grenfel, who really throws a spanner in the works; proposing to Nellie on what seems to be a whim he creates an air of jealousy and resentment from Jill that isn’t quite accounted for by a loss of a business partner.

The book was first published in 1922 and so, naturally, it’s ambiguous about the relationship between Jill and Nellie and that’s what makes this book so good.  The first sentence of the story tells us, “The two girls were usually known by their surnames,” and they are referred to as such throughout by the third person narration.  From the get go Lawrence is using language that is normally reserved for men to apply to these women and the masculinisation of women to imply lesbianism is one of the oldest tricks in the book.  The pair also share a bedroom- despite having at least one spare and there is a scene in which Jill nags Nellie to not stay up too late and come to bed which is one of the most stereotypically married conversations I’ve ever read.

On the other hand, Nellie does agree to marry Henry.  And, yes, this is partly so he stops kissing her (because this is 1922 and accepting marriage proposals to prevent sexual assault is apparently a thing) and, no she doesn’t believe that she will ever actually have to marry him.  But it raises doubts.  It is possible that Jill’s jealousy is not routed in losing her girlfriend, but in watching a friend that she assumed would be single with her have a possibility of a new life away from the failing farm.  It is stated in the book that Nellie does not see her arrangement with Jill, whatever it is, a permanent thing.  She does not expect them to grow into old ladies together.

Truthfully, the best part of this book is its ambiguity.  There are some parallels drawn between Henry and the fox that are far more obvious and less interesting- Jill insists on shooting the thing, while Nellie misses her chance to do so because she is fascinated with it in the moment she gains her best opportunity to do so.  The Fox has only been made into a film once, a thing that moved the action to Canada and removed all of the questions around Jill and Nellie’s relationship and that’s such a missed opportunity.  The book is good because it raises far more questions that it gives itself time to answer; there is no point in the thing if it is explicit.  Where Lawrence fails (to my mind) with Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the explicit and so the strength of The Fox is that everything is implication.  Everything is a relationship between the two women and nothing is.

My next book will be The Collector by John Fowles.