Review from Independent on Sunday (London): \"Lawrence forged his own language from an intensive reading of his great predecessors; he observed the natural world with scrupulous attention and applied a bold and witty imagination to what he saw...a marvellous writer.\" -- Claire Tomalin

Synopsis: This book contains three short novels. In \"The Fox,\" the intrusions of a wild animal and the unexpected appearance of a male visitor disrupt the solitude of two women on a farm. \"The Captain\'s Doll\" is a portrait of a Scottish soldier in occupied Germany and the woman for whom he feels an uneasy fascination. \"The Ladybird\" features the relationship between a wounded German prisoner of war and the Englishwoman who nurses him back to health. All three novels center on the struggle for understanding between men and women..

Synopsis: The Penguin edition reproduces the authoritative text established by the Cambridge Lawrence Edition, which is based on rigorous study of surviving manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and early printings. The Cambridge editors have provided texts in a state as close as possible to what Lawrence himself would have expected to see printed. Deletions deliberately made by printers, publishers, or their editors, accidently by typists and printers--at times removing entire pages of text--have been restored, while house-styling introduced by printers is removed, in so far as it is possible.

Publisher\'s Note: The struggle of men and women towards a mutual understanding binds these three short novels set during and after the First World War.

The Fox In this essay, I will look deeper into D.H.Lawrence\'s novel The Fox, and offer a few different ways of interpreting the story. D.H.Lawrence is very masterly in confusing people with what his actual point is, although he struggles to make some things concerning the plot crystal clear to his readers. He wants the reader to understand what goes on in the story, but leaves the conclusions open on purpose. I will try to introduce some of the most obvious ways of understanding what actually happens in this story, and in addition, exemplify some of the more uncommon interpretations of it. This particular piece of work is a description of the life of two women at the beginning of the 1920\'s, and a man who appears in their lives: Banford, March and Henry. Banford is a fragile, pale and physically weak woman, who loves gossiping and preparing food. She is a very womanly woman. Banford lives on a farm with March, who is \'the man in the house\'. Her body is robust and strong, and she is the one who does all the men\'s work on the farm. She takes care of the outdoor work and the woodwork for the farm when necessary. These two women are like an old married couple, used to each other and a bit tired of each other. Nevertheless, they do not want men to come and interfere with their lives. They won\'t even have male animals on their farm. Then one day, a young soldier called Henry comes along and makes a huge impression on March. It isn\'t that much of a falling-in-love, it\'s more or less a spell that has been put over March. She has a strange feeling that Henry is the fox that she had seen earlier on the wood-edge and that had also made a strange impression on her. The fox - as well as Henry - seems to see throught her and to know her thoroughly. Henry looks very much like the fox and seems to be similar by his nature. \"The young man - or youth, for he would not be more than twenty - now advanced and stood in the inner doorway. March, already under the influence of his strange, soft, modulated voice, stared at him spellbound. He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin were fine, fair hairs, like a down, but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look.\" (p.1276) The story evolves into a queer love story between a woman and a man - or actually, it could be between a woman and another woman. In fact, you could easily call this a triangle drama - the funny thing in this particular case is that the two people fighting over the third person are of different sex. One of these two people is always the third wheel, but we never quite know which one. And that is something that can lead the reader into several different directions with their interpretations. The relationship between Henry and Banford is rather an odd one. After having got over the shock of a stranger coming to her home, Banford is the one who wants Henry to stay on their farm. She wants company and she likes the stories Henry tells. She thinks of him as her brother. Henry is not particularly interested in Banford at any stage. However, he wants Banford to like him, because he needs her permission to be able to stay and get to know March better. Later on, when Banford starts realizing Henry\'s intentions, she becomes very irritated by Henry, and the both of them feel rather jealous of each other. Banford is not willing to give up March and neither is Henry, so their relationship ends up being rather competitive. The funny thing is that, at some point, March seems to even enjoy this fight over her, and probably wants to prolong and feed it - but only to an extent. Something very typical of this story and also D.H.Lawrence\'s whole production is the constant reference to nature and different species of animals. There are for example fowls, a fox, heifers and ducks. They are all in the story to tell us something about people. The same vocabulary is often used twice: first to animals, then to people.Hens are referred to as women - or as Banford - and the fox refers to men - or Henry - who want to take control over the \'hens\'. Actually, the story implies that women need to have a man before they can stop being irritated and delicate, and before they can have peace, just as \"there was no peace till they (the hens/the women) were shut up and asleep\" (p.1272). In this case, \'being asleep\' probably means being with a man and submitting oneself to that man. Practically, this means giving up one\'s own life and committing oneself to serving the man and letting him decide over and take care of everything. This story could easily be said to be homosexual, because March is the one whom Henry really wants and March is a very manly woman, she is a \'foxy lady\'. \"Since he had realized that she was a woman, and vulnerable, accessible, a certain heaviness had possessed his soul. He did not want to make love to her. He shrank from any such performance, almost with fear.\" (p.1305) Nevertheless, March\'s sexual orientation could be debated. You cannot quite say whether she is a hen or a fox. She has been living with Banford for many years and she most probably loves the woman, which is a sort of lesbian element in the story. In spite of this, she feels very drawn to Henry, and it seems to be purely physical. Therefore, she has to decide between a woman with whom she enjoys living but who cannot satisfy her sexually and a man who can give her sexual satisfaction but who wants to submit her as his wife. March seems powerless to resist Henry when they are together but whenever she is alone with Banford, she understands how foolish it would be to give up her own life because of the \'crush\' she has on Henry. She wants to work, to be strong and to take care of her own things, and she would never be able to do that with Henry. The Fox deals also with having children, parenthood and a woman\'s natural desire and need to be a mother. This is referred to in many metaphors. \"One heifer, unfortunately, refused absolutely to stay in the Bailey Farm closes. No matter how March made up the fences, the heifer was out, wild in the woods, or trespassing on the neighbouring pasture...\" (p.1271) The fences probably allude to the difference between Banford and Henry, March being the heifer. March wants to have sex, she wants to have a man, she wants to have children, but she never could with Banford. March has not given birth yet, but she is willing to \'trespass on the neighbouring pasture\' - to be with Henry, that is - if that\'s what it takes to get children. After Henry has asked her to marry him, she feels as if her wish had come true but she also realizes that the child might be a burden. \"He stooped at once, to take an armful of little logs and carry them into the kitchen, where they were piled in a corner. March also helped, filling her arms and carrying the logs on her breast as if they were some heavy child.\" (p.1286) Henry is very straightforward and even pushy when asking March to marry him. He thinks of March as a hare he has to go and shoot. It is a competition of life and death and Henry is certain of his victory. He thinks very highly of himself and he is certain he is wiser than March, even though she is much older than he is. He also likes to tease people and he enjoys knowing something that others do not know, and that is what happens both when he is asking March to marry him and when he is telling Banford about it. In addition, he teases March about her thinking he is the fox. He enjoys being in control and superior to other people. The problem is that he thinks he should be that way in a marriage, too. In that sense, he is a pure chauvinist. \"He wanted her to give herself without defences, to sink and become submerged in him. --- He wanted her to commit herself to him, and to put her independent spirit to sleep. He wanted to take away from her all her effort, all that seemed her very raison d\'être. --- He wanted to take away her consciousness, and make her just his woman.\" (p.1317-1318) The story itself, however, is rather critical of this view of women. It can be read as a wholly feminist story. One might argue that Banford is mentally very strong - despite her fragile body. She is understandably shaken by the news about March and Henry getting married, but she is able to look further than that. She just calmly asks the couple to inform her about the day they are going to leave, so that she can get herself a new partner. In addition, she never thinks about leaving herself, although that is probably what a person with low self-esteem would do. She is the principal investor of the farm, but she never even thought about selling it to Henry and March. Even more so, she knows how valuable and irreplaceable women are. That is exactly what she tries to get through to March when March forgets herself under Henry\'s spell. \"I thought you had too much pride, really I did. A woman\'s got to hold herself high, especially with a youth like that. Why, he\'s impudent. --- And then he\'s so cocky and self-assured. My word, he puts my back up. I simply can\'t imagine how you can let him treat you so cheaply.\" (p.1300) March is powerful in another way. She is strong physically, and she is very hard-working. And even more so, she has taken care of Banford and the farm for years. After Banford\'s death, she first feels a sense of great loss and pain. Afterwards she feels relief, because now she doesn\'t have to look after Banford. It could be said that March is also in control over Henry, for she knows more than he does. She knows what she wants to do and what she intends to do, and that is very likely to be different from Henry\'s plans for her future. In addition, also Henry realizes that it isn\'t certain March will accept his proposal. And even if she would end up marrying him, the last few lines of the text imply that March is not going to submit herself to Henry - even though that would seem the easy way out. It would be easy for her to forget her own desires when she has a person as enchanting as Henry there to handle everything for her. But March is strong and she will not \'close her eyes and give in to sleep\'. In addition, Henry is described as the \'baddy\' of the story. One might even say that he has nothing but his charm on his side. He thinks he is on top of the world (at least March\'s and Banford\'s world) and that he is getting everything he wants, but he cannot be much of a man if he has to kill a person to get the woman he wants. It is quite clear that things would not have turned as they did if he hadn\'t killed Banford. March had already made up her mind not to marry him and therefore she had chosen Banford over him. However, she is sort of left with Henry in the end. Henry shooting the fox can be interpreted as Henry destroying himself or, more generally, men destroying each other. In spite of all these connections to feminism, one could also find several anti-feminist (or even chauvinist) elements in the story. It implies that men have this odd ability to put a spell on women. It implies that women have no way of resisting this \'magic\' and that they don\'t even want to resist it. Actually, one might go as far as to state that women cannot live a happy life without men. It is argued that men can \'see through women\', know how women think and therefore have the ability to manipulate them. In this story, Henry does it by looking straight into March\'s eyes, kissing her, or merely with his scent, laughter or voice. All these are things that will \'kill\' March, make her Henry\'s property. Some might consider Henry\'s killing Banford as an evidence of strenght and winning the \'competition\' between men and women. A good example of a reference to Henry\'s victory occures right after he has forced March to accept his marriage proposal and after having devastated Banford with the news. \"In the afternoon he went out again at once with the gun. He came in at nightfall with a rabbit and a pigeon.\" (p.1292) March and Banford had just earlier been referred to as a hare and a pigeon. The Fox also gives a good ground for a Freudian theory. Freud was very interested in dreams and the subconscious in general. He also had his own views of women and their way of thinking. One can easily see the similarities between hysterical women described by Sigmund Freud and the hysterical women described by D. H. Lawrence. March has two dreams in this story, both of which are somehow very meaningful and modify the way she sees the situation at hand. Both dreams also work as omens. In the first dream, March hears the fox calling for her and she understands that she really is fascinated by him but that he is likely to hurt her very badly. In the other dream, she foresees Banford\'s death and tries to put the memory of the beloved Banford - and her own pain - aside by covering the body with the skin of a fox. In that way, she uses Henry to get over Banford. Or another interpretation might be that by covering Banford with the skin, Banford is made the \'baddy\' of the story. At its own time, the 1920\'s, The Fox was most probably not read as a homosexual or lesbian story, because that was not considered even a possibility. Homosexuality was not acceptable, and it certainly was not discussed openly. Women were not thought to have sexual desires at all. That\'s why women were \'allowed\' to live together and there could not be anything sexual about it. Freud had come out with his own theorys just about the same time than this story was published, and so one might find this the realization of Freud\'s theory. This is also a modernist text, although Lawrence was probably not the most typical modernist writer. He wrote about the lost connections between man and nature, about culture and art, and he had more direct moral and social intentions than was characteristic of modernism. Lawrence did not accept the experimental narrative techniques of other modernist, either. That, however, does not lessen the value of his work. He developed a distinctive style, both direct and symbolic. He wrote many well-known stories and novels, such as The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley\'s Lover and Sons and Lovers, which have put D.H.Lawrence in the front rank of 20th-century wroters.