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    The Fox
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    The Fox
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    The Fox
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    The Fox

    By D. H. Lawrence

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This early work by D.H Lawrence was originally published in 1923 and we are now republishing it with a brand new biography. Set in post-First World War Berkshire, The Fox, like many of D. H. Lawrence's other major works, deals with psychological relationships, in this case, of three protagonists in a triangle of love and hatred. Lacking help from any male labourers, Nellie March and Jill Banford struggle to maintain a marginal livelihood at the Bailey Farm. A fox has raged through the poultry, and although the women-particularly the more masculine Nellie-have tried to shoot the intruder, he seems always to elude traps or gunshot. The fox becomes a hindrance, but March finds she cannot hunt it, and rather, she becomes entranced by it. Shortly after this, Henry, a young man, comes to stay with the women, and a link is established between the fox and Henry. D.H Lawrence is an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2014
    ISBN9781473398443
    Author

    D. H. Lawrence

    David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.

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    Reviews for The Fox

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      “The Fox” is a short story published in 1923, a few years after “Woman in Love” and a handful of years before “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. It tells the story of two women trying to eke out an existence on a farm during WWI; the pair are beset at first by a fox who comes after their chickens, and then later by a soldier on leave. Lawrence leaves it to us to decide if two women are lovers and it could be interpreted either way, but regardless, the soldier comes between them when he becomes obsessed with the idea of marrying one of them. The fox that vexes them seems to have human characteristics and the soldier who follows has animal characteristics; the two share a common hypnotic power over poor Nellie. I did like the feminist message that came through as the man’s ultimate desire is to conquer the woman and to dominate her (“He wanted her to submit, yield, blindly pass away out of all her strenuous consciousness. He wanted to take away her consciousness, and make her just his woman. Just his woman.”), and aside from the subtle comparison to a brute animal, this is shown to sap the happiness out of the life of what was previously an independent woman. However, the juxtaposition of the fox and the soldier is a little heavy-handed; the adjectives used to describe them are blended a bit too much, and stylistically I don’t think this work is as successful as it could have been.Quotes:This image was striking:“’Kiss me before we go, now you’ve said it,’ he said.And he kissed her gently on the mouth, with a young frightened kiss. It made her feel so young, too, and frightened, and wondering: and tired, tired, as if she were going to sleep.They went indoors. And in the sitting-room, there, crouched by the fire like a queer little witch, was Banford. She looked round with reddened eyes as they entered…”On obsession and rage, which seemed classicly Lawrencian with those exclamation points:“The boy read this letter in camp as he was cleaning his kit. He set his teeth and for a moment went almost pale, yellow round the eyes with fury. He said nothing and saw nothing and felt nothing but a livid rage that was quite unreasoning. Balked! Balked again! Balked! He wanted the woman, he had fixed like the doom upon having her. He felt that was his doom, his destiny, and his reward, to have this woman. She was his heaven and hell on earth, and he would have none elsewhere. Sightless with rage and thwarted madness he got through the morning. Save that in his mind he was lurking and scheming towards an issue, he would have committed some insane act.”On happiness:“…it seemed to her that the whole of life and everything was only a horrible abyss of nothingness. The more you reached after the fatal flower of happiness which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you became aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any further. You pluck flower after flower – it is never the flower. “
    • 3/5
      Two women invite a visitor to stay on their farm and while everything seems polite and proper on the surface, as they sit taking high tea, underneath lurks change and danger..
    • 2/5
      Tres depressing! The story didn't really work for me because I couldn't bring myself to care for any of the characters. And with a theme of "Life sucks. What's the Use?," I was less than enthused. I must re-read my Lawrence because, although, I remember his novels as being very dark I don't recall them being as depressing as this story.
    • 3/5
      The story of two young women who live on a quiet farm together. March is a quiet but strong dreamer, and Banford is a delicate, practical thinker.The simplicity and order of their life is changed and turned upside down when a handsome young man named Henry Grenfel appears randomly at their doorstep.A short, but powerfully written little book of romance and friendship.Even after I finished the book, I was still unable to precisely determine whether the character of Henry was good or full of lies.I liked the characters a lot, and the significance of the fox through-out the story.Though not exciting, this is a pretty good book.
    • 4/5
      This first Lawrence I've read impressed me greatly and induced me to read the Britannica bio on him as well as the 1st chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Fox, which will never be accused of being obscene, tells the story of an unusual courtship between a soldier on leave and one of two maiden ladies trying (with limited success) to run a chicken farm in England during World War I. The soldier shoots a fox which has been despoiling their hen house but then despoils one of the ladies by proposing marriage to and eventually making off with her house mate, leaving this unfortunate woman dead from an accidental tree fall. The slain fox seems perhaps a metaphor for God - or Life Force - and the very equivocal relationship between the newly-weds at the conclusion appears to be a lament by the author protesting what seem to him the unsolvable riddles of Life and Love.