Lady Into Fox

By David Garnett

Winner of both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate Black Prize for Fiction, David Garnett's Lady Into Fox is the story of a man whose wife is turned into a fox. Need we say more? “At last, at last, the Hawthornden has chosen the right book.” – Virginia Woolf

“The whole psychology of man and beast is, I should say, flawless, in essence and exposition.” – Joseph Conrad “It is as astonishing as a new sort of animal...suddenly running about in the world...as whimsically inevitable as a very healthy kitten. It shows up most other stories as the clockwork beasts they are.” – H.G. Wells, The Adelphi

“It is one of the strangest little fictions in the English language. ... Garnett's novella has attracted numerous readings: a political allegory about marriage, a fable about female sexuality, a coded love letter to Garnett's former lover, the painter Duncan Grant.” – Judith Mackrell, The Guardian

“The story of Lady Into Fox is gripping and terrible.... What I love best about this story is its straight-faced, ever so slightly sly prose... The author uses humor, fantasy, allegory and realism to explore to explore pain, passion, conjugal fidelity, love, death and the whole damn thing.” – Andrew Barrow, Independent

“Garnett’s story intimates that the sexual relation rests on the delusion that kin can be converted into kind. If the fable also applies to same-sex love (and I think it does), then perhaps Garnett’s point is darker still: every kind attempt we make to “claim kin” with one another is a sort of violence. Wild we begin toward one another—at day’s end, wild we remain.” – Maud Ellmann, Public Books

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wix.com/watersgreenhouse

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watersgreen House
• Release date: May 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463520925

David Garnett

David Garnett (1892-1981) was a British writer. Born in Brighton, East Sussex, Garnett was the son of Edward Garnett, a critic and publisher, and Constance Clara Black, a translator of Russian known for bringing the works of Chekhov and Dostoevsky to an English audience. A pacifist, he spent the years of the First World War as a conscientious objector working on fruit farms along the eastern coast England. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he befriended many of the leading artists and intellectuals of his day. After publishing his debut novel, Dope Darling (1918), under a pseudonym, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Lady into Fox (1922), an allegorical fantasy novel. His 1955 novel Aspects of Love was adapted into a musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Alongside poet Francis Meynell, Garnett founded the Nonesuch Press, an independent publisher known for its editions of classic novels, poetry collections, and children’s books. Garnett, a bisexual man, had relationships with fellow Bloomsbury Group members Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant, and was married twice in his life. Following the death of his first wife Ray, with whom he had two sons, Grant married Angelica Bell, the daughter of Grant and Vanessa Bell, whose sister was renowned novelist Virginia Woolf. Together, the Garnetts raised four daughters, three of whom went on to careers in the arts. Following his divorce from Angelica, Garnett spent the rest of his life in Montcuq, France.

Book preview

LADY INTO FOX

DAVID GARNETT

Illustrated with wood engravings by R. A. GARNETT

With paintings of David Garnett by Duncan Grant

And an introduction to David Garnett by Keith Hale

Edited to standardize punctuation by Michael Wilson

London

© 2019 by Watersgreen House

First published October 1922.

All rights reserved.

6 x 9 (15.24 x 22.86 cm) 

Black & White on White paper

ISBN-13: 978-1098911560

BISAC: Fiction / Classics

BISAC: Fiction / Humorous

Cover art: On the Beach, Bournemouth by Henry Scott Tuke

Parts of Keith Hale’s introduction to David Garnett first appeared in Hale’s entry for Garnett in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Other sections appeared in Friends & Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, edited by Hale for Yale University Press, London.

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Lady into Fox

Winner of both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate Black Prize for Fiction

At last, at last, the Hawthornden has chosen the right book. – Virginia Woolf

The whole psychology of man and beast is, I should say, flawless, in essence and exposition. – Joseph Conrad

It is as astonishing as a new sort of animal…suddenly running about in the world…as whimsically inevitable as a very healthy kitten. It shows up most other stories as the clockwork beasts they are. – H.G. Wells, The Adelphi

It is one of the strangest little fictions in the English language. … Garnett's novella has attracted numerous readings: a political allegory about marriage, a fable about female sexuality, a coded love letter to Garnett's former lover, the painter Duncan Grant. – Judith Mackrell, The Guardian

"The story of Lady Into Fox is gripping and terrible…. What I love best about this story is its straight-faced, ever so slightly sly prose… The author uses humor, fantasy, allegory and realism to explore to explore pain, passion, conjugal fidelity, love, death and the whole damn thing." – Andrew Barrow, Independent

Garnett’s story intimates that the sexual relation rests on the delusion that kin can be converted into kind. If the fable also applies to same-sex love (and I think it does), then perhaps Garnett’s point is darker still: every kind attempt we make to claim kin with one another is a sort of violence. Wild we begin toward one another—at day’s end, wild we remain. – Maud Ellmann, Public Books

David Garnett painting by Duncan Grant

David Garnett painting by Duncan Grant

David Garnett

Born 9 March 1892 in Brighton, David Garnett was a prolific writer best known for his satirical fantasies Lady Into Fox (1922), the tale of a man whose wife is suddenly transformed into a fox, and A Man in the Zoo (1924), concerned with a man who is accepted by the London Zoo to be exhibited as an example of Homo sapiens. Later novels, not fantastic, were not so successful. In The Golden Echo (1953), The Flowers of the Forest (1955), and The Familiar Faces (1962), Garnett described his memories of the English literary coterie—including the Bloomsbury group—of which he was a member dring the period of World War I and the 1920s. Much of what he described was shocking to the general public, as was the fully nude photograph included in one edition. Great Friends: Portraits of Seventeen Writers (1980) continued in the same vein. Garnett’s novel Aspects of Love (1955) was not very popular upon publication but has since been made famous due to its adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Webber into a musical in 1989. Garnett’s other novels are Two by Two (1963) and A Clean Slate (1971). He edited several collections of correspondence, including The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (1938) and Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries (1978). Garnett died on 17 February 1981 at Le Verger Charry, Montcuq, France.

Nicknamed Bunny by his friends, Garnett was the son of Constance Garnett, the preferred English translator of André Gide. A life-long friend of most of Bloomsbury’s central figures, he studied at the Royal College of Science, Kensington. As Robert Skidelsky points out in his biography of Maynard Keynes, Garnett was remarkable in his social circle because he was neither a Cambridge Apostle nor even a Cambridge man. Neither was he a Strachey nor a Stephen. He was, however, a handsome young man with liberal views on sex. He met another handsome young man, Rupert Brooke, in 1909 when he was seventeen and Brooke was twenty-one. The next year, Brooke asked mutual friend Noel Olivier to invite Garnett to Grantchester. When Garnett arrived late, Brooke took him after midnight to bathe naked in Byron’s Pool. The next summer, the two shared a cabin together. Garnett describes the experience in The Golden Echo:

"I was very happy and was aware that for some reason Rupert liked me… His immense charm and intelligence had not yet been spoilt by success and cerain idées fixes, which later came to resemble hallucination. With me, in our midnight cabin talks, he was simple, sincere and intimate, with a certain lazy warmth. It was only later that he was apt to utter warnings about the wickedness of other people" (222).

David Garnett back view painting by Duncan Grant

That Rupert was fond of him is clear in Brooke’s letters to his friend James Strachey. James himself wrote to his brother Lytton in June 1915: I had a long interview with Bunny the other night. He was partly drunk, and poured out a lot of interesting information. He said he was very fond of a great many different people, and enjoyed copulating with all of them, of whatever sex. Garnett’s relationships included Vanessa Bell, Daphne Olivier, Francis Birrell, and Duncan Grant, who fell deeply in love with him at a young age. There is a photo of the two boys standing together nude. Noel Oliver often referred to them as the darlings. Although in later life Garnett’s reputation was that of a lady’s man, Paul Roche, in With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey, says that once when he remarked that he thought Garnett was the great heterosexual of all time, Grant responded, He was, but he could still make love to me (19-20).

During the Great War, Garnett served alongside his friend and lover Francis Birrell in a Quaker relief camp in France. Brooke had tried to talk him into joining his division, but Brooke’s hostility toward Birrell and James Strachey antagonised him, and he refused (The Flowers of the Forest 7). After the war, Garnett and Birrell ran a London bookshop together and founded the Nonesuch Press. Garnett’s relationship with Birrell had sent D. H. Lawrence into such a rage that Garnett decided to end his friendship with Lawrence. It was about Garnett, Birrell, and Grant that Lawrence famously wrote that just thinking about them made him dream of black beetles, which was the one thing his character in Women in Love feared. Soon, Garnett was living with Grant, and not long after, Vanessa