Lady Into Fox

"I was hoping you would make that connection. Maud Ellmann wrote about this book for us, and made the brilliant comparison that it was published within a few years of Kafka’s Metamorphosis ; in some ways you can think of it as another metamorphosis story. It is about a man who marries a woman named Sylvia Fox. One day, while they are out walking, she turns into a fox—this happens in a deadpan, magical realism way. Garnett takes seriously the idea that she might have become a fox, but also takes seriously the idea that the protagonist might just have made this up—that he has a random fox that he believes is his wife. There she is with him in any event. He reads Clarissa to her, but she’s too busy staring at the birdcage in the corner to really listen. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I guess, in a way, it has something in common with Ovid’s Metamorphoses , in that it takes seriously the notion that the boundary between the human and the non-human might not be as thick as we think. Then, let’s follow the path… What would it mean to bring a fox into your human life? And to try to have it come into the parlour with you and talk to guests? The original is illustrated with amazing woodcuts, which are in the recent edition too. I love that this book has come back into public view. He also wrote a book called Man in the Zoo, which is about, well, a man who is in the zoo, next to the gorilla. David Garnett was one of those writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, rotating on the margins of the Bloomsbury set. He’s the son of the translator Constance Garnett. So he grew up in this world of Joseph Conrad hanging around the breakfast table, that kind of thing. I think it’s very typical of writing between the wars, in that it is at once in a very comfortable, staid, bourgeois domestic space—the married couple, the utterly respectable suburban country home that readers would recognise instantaneously—and then the absolute bizarreness. Does the formerly human vixen want to go visit her relatives in the woods? Maybe we’ll go for a walk and see if she can meet a gentleman fox? It’s as if something out of Grimm has come into ordinary life. I think you could read it as meaning that there’s something alienated and strange about our ordinary life. Like, we want to treat our bourgeois domesticity as if it’s inevitable and natural and the only way to be on Earth, but this is a reminder that the other, that cosmic strangeness lurks everywhere. That’s a great connection. I agree. Actually, I would say that it’s a bit surprising to me that Man in the Zoo hasn’t had a similar coming-back-to-life, just because it also treats human beings as animals among other animals. It’s a wonderful idea. But that book does very strange things with race which are a little hard to pin down, and definitely make you uncomfortable. That may explain it. It’s a little like Huckleberry Finn : great, but people are freaked out by it."