University of Virginia Library

F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), p. 256.

Quoted in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald P. Draper (1970), p. 196.

To George Ford, in Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence (1965), p. 102, The Fox shows Lawrence daydreaming of himself as the savior of women; to Peg Brayfield, in "Lawrence's 'Male and Female Principles' and the Symbolism of 'The Fox,' Mosaic, 4 (Spring 1971), 41-51, Lawrence is quite critical of Grenfel's attempts to rescue March. Julian Moynahan, in The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (1963), p. 208, describes the murder of Banford as a "deed of life," to inspire admiration; but Keith Sagar, in The Art of D. H. Lawrence (1966), p. 117, sees it rather as evidence of Lawrence's "withering vision."

D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters, 2 vols., ed. Harry T. Moore (1962), I, 566. Subsequent references in the text to Lawrence's letters refer to these volumes (CL) unless otherwise indicated.

Moore reproduced the holograph manuscript and provided a printed transcript as well. But since this is not totally accurate, my textual references to the Lazarus manuscript—appearing as L followed by a page number—are to the holograph version itself and not to Moore's transcription.

D. H. Lawrence, Letters, ed. Aldous Huxley (1932), pp. 480-481.

This journal is now publicly available only in the British Library copy, to which my parenthetical notations—H followed by a page number—refer. The corrected proof sheets from Hutchinson's Story Magazine were owned by the late Mr. John E. Baker, Jr., of San Miguel, Mexico, who kindly answered my questions about them in our two-year correspondence before his untimely death in November 1977. Thanks to his widow, Mrs. Dudley Baker, I have examined xerox copies of four of the eight galley pages; damage to the material prevented further copying. The proof sheets are part of the Baker holdings auctioned by Christie's in New York in April 1979. According to Mr. Baker's privately-printed catalogue of his twentieth century literature collection (Desbarats, Ontario, 1977), p. 17, the Hutchinson's proofs show "10 revisions (deletions and additions), 20 words, and 13 typographical corrections in Lawrence's hand.

D. H. Lawrence, Letters to Martin Secker, 1911-1930 (1970), pp. 34-37.

Brian Finney, "The Hitherto Unknown Publication of Some D. H. Lawrence Short Stories," Notes and Queries, 217 (February 1972), 55.

See especially Patrizio Rossi, "Lawrence's Two Foxes: A Comparison of the Texts," Essays in Criticism, 22 (July 1972), 265-278; Rossi, "'The Fox' e 'La lupa': D. H. Lawrence lettore di Verga," English Miscellany, ed. Mario Praz, 24 (Rome, 1973-74), 299-320; and Suzanne Wolkenfeld, "'The Sleeping Beauty' Retold: D. H. Lawrence's 'The Fox,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 14 (Fall 1977), 345-352. Another viewpoint based on only two Foxes is found in E. F. Shields, "Broken Vision in Lawrence's 'The Fox,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 9 (Fall 1972), 353-363. Confusion about dating of the "two" versions is shown by Emil Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, trans. Katherine M. Delavenay, 2 vols. (1972), vol. I: The Formative Years, 1885-1919, 439, and Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence's Shorter Fictions (1962), p. 63. Even Harry T. Moore, in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, tentatively dates the Lazarus manuscript from late 1919, p. 28, n.

Diary listing, in E. W. Tedlock, Jr. ed. The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts: A Descriptive Bibliography (1948), p. 89. Subsequent references in the text to Lawrence's diary refer to this volume.

With the permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited, the Humanities Research Center, and the Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, I have examined a photocopy of this manuscript; I refer to it by the letter T followed by a page number. As a convenience I also include page references to the widely-available Viking Penguin (VP) paperback edition of The Fox in Four Short Novels of D. H. Lawrence.

The final page number of the manuscript is a holograph 67, but there are actually sixty-eight pages: Lawrence did not realize that whoever typed the first portion of the manuscript had inadvertently used the same number (23) for two succeeding pages.

See Judith G. Ruderman, "Prototypes for Lawrence's The Fox," Journal of Modern Literature, in press.

D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, ed. Edward Nehls (1957-59), I, 463, 466.

Mr. John E. Baker, Jr., personal correspondence, 30 December 1975.

The adjective disappears completely in the Dial and every subsequent published version of the text.

Ford Madox Ford, Portraits From Life (1937), p. 85.

Composite Biography, I, 492.

See Judith G. Ruderman, "The Fox and the 'Devouring Mother,'" D. H. Lawrence Review, 10 (Fall 1977), 251-269.

Rossi, "Lawrence's Two Foxes," p. 275; Wolkenfeld, p. 348; Moynahan; Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence (1963), p. 86.

Professor Elgin W. Mellown of Duke University suggests to me that Lawrence may have had in mind the Brangwen farm, the Marsh, in The Rainbow.

Nicholas Joost and Alvin Sullin Sullivan, D. H. Lawrence and the Dial (1970), p. 62. Further references in the text to Lawrence's relationship with the Dial are to this volume.

Other variations, all of them minor, seem to have been made or suggested by the Dial editors in an effort toward conciseness, or to bring Lawrence's prose in line with standard—or simply American—usage. Certain of the Dial variants are unfortunate. In the authorial commentary at the end of the story, Lawrence generalizes about March's experiences and uses the present tense in order to apply his remarks to all readers: "The more you reach after the fatal flower of happiness. . . ." (T, p. 66); the Dial (p. 196), followed by the Secker, Seltzer, Viking Portable and Heinemann Phoenix editions, substitutes the past tense reached (the word appears as reach in Viking Compass, Viking Penguin [p. 177], Bantam and Dent Everyman's: either the error was corrected by an astute editorial assistant or the word was changed accidentally when new editions were re-set). Lawrence had first written reached in the manuscript, but he struck out the last two letters and continued the paragraph in the present tense. For another example, Grenfel's face, which had been "queer, chubbed, ruddy" in the manuscript (T, p. 54), becomes "queer, chubby, ruddy" in the Dial (p. 87) and all subsequent versions (VP, p. 164)—a change that lacks consistency as well as euphony, since Grenfel's face was already described as "chubbed" on page 80 of the Dial (VP, p. 158). Another variant lacking consistency concerns the word nonchalant: Lawrence in the Taormina manuscript seems fond of the construction "she said [or replied, or cried], nonchalant" following direct address, but on two occasions he inadvertently left out the comma before the adjective (T, pp. 44, 48). The Dial changes one of these expressions—"she said nonchalant"—to "she said nonchalantly" (D, p. 586, VP, p. 151), while simply retaining Lawrence's mistake in the second instance: "she cried nonchalant" (D, p. 78, VP, p. 156). All editions follow the Dial in the first change, but only the Seltzer and Viking Portable repeat the second error. Finally, in the Dial and all subsequent texts, the last sentence—"He watched her"—is omitted from this paragraph: "'I hope it is,' said Banford, feeling nettled by him. He had a strange, suave assurance and a wide-eyed bright look that got on her nerves this evening. He watched her" (T, p. 30, D, p. 569, VP, p. 134). Mrs. Carmichael may have inadvertently left off the words when she made her typescript, for this very small sentence is the final one on a holograph page, placed all the way over by the left-hand margin and written in Lawrence's characteristically restrained hand.

D. H. Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, ed. Gerald M. Lacy (1976), p. 30. Further references in the text to Lawrence's relationship with Seltzer are to this volume.

F. Warren Roberts, in A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (1963), p. 61, incorrectly lists the date of the first American edition as 14 November 1923.

The Seltzer text (not proofread by Lawrence) contains numerous variants with no precedent in either the Taormina manuscript or the Dial publication: for example, Banford's father says "Ha!" twice when speaking to Grenfel (Sltzr, p. 212, VPort, p. 294), whereas in all other versions he says "Hm!" (VP, p. 171). The Seltzer text changes March's "small, patent shoes" (VP, p. 156) to the expression familiar to American readers: "small, patentleather shoes" (Sltzr, p. 191, VPort, p. 276). It also has a line of ducks "cackling their way top speed downwards towards the fence . . . and cackling as excitedly as if they brought news of the Spanish Armada" (Sltzr, p. 214), although Lawrence had written (and all other versions reproduce) "cockling their way top speed," which is British dialect for wobbling (VP, p. 172). Another Seltzer deviation from previous texts can be found in the Viking Compass, Viking Penguin, and Bantam paperbacks as well as in the Viking Portable: March feels a spark fall from Grenfel's eyes "as had fallen from the dark eyes of the fox" (VP, p. 128). Secker, followed by Heinemann Phoenix and Dent Everyman, reproduces the manuscript and Dial versions with "as it had fallen. . . ." (T, p. 23, D, p. 486, Sckr, p. 102), which is the clearer construction. The Secker text itself contains unprecedented variants. In one case, a double negative—"You haven't a very high opinion of fowls and cattle, haven't you?" he said" (Sckr, p. 97)—finds its way into the Heinemann Phoenix but not into the Compass edition that used the Phoenix for a model. Other variants appear in every succeeding edition except for the Seltzer and Viking Portable (which contain the Taormina and/or Dial variants). For example, toward the end of the story the ambiguous she in "And if she had married a man" is changed to the proper noun Jill (Sckr. p. 156, VP, p. 177). Another variation occurs when Grenfel explains to the women why he will have to stay on with them at Bailey Farm:

Taormina, p. 23

• "At the Swan they've got this Flu, and at the Plough and Harrow they've got the soldiers who are collecting the hay for the army: besides in the private houses. There's ten men and a corporal altogether billeted in the village, they tell me."

Dial, pp. 485-86

• "At the Swan they've got this Flu, and at the Plough and Harrow they've got the soldiers who are collecting the hay for the army: besides in the private houses, there's ten men and a corporal altogether billeted in the village, they tell me."

Secker, p. 101

• "At the Swan they've got this flu, and at the Plough and Harrow they've got the soldiers who are collecting the hay for the army: besides, in the private houses, there's ten men and a corporal altogether billeted in the village, they tell me."

Seltzer (and Viking Portable) follows the Dial here, in what I consider to be an inferior variation: all questions of meaning aside, this version seems too polished to have come out of Grenfel's mouth. The Secker variation, found in all other editions as well (VP, pp. 127-28), contains a different sense—"moreover" for the word besides, and therefore is also suspect. The original version in the Taormina manuscript has the merits of being not only perfectly understandable to the reader but also entirely appropriate to the speaker. The Heinemann Phoenix edition contains a variant, followed in Viking Compass, Viking Penguin, and Bantam, that is an obvious error: this text has March and Banford washing up the "tea-cups" in the kitchen (HP, p. 9, VP, p. 119), although in every other version, beginning with the Lazarus manuscript, they are washing up the "tea-things."

For aid in the preparation of this paper I wish to thank Elgin W. Mellown; the late John E. Baker, Jr.; David Farmer of the University of Tulsa; the British Museum; Alvin Sullivan of Southern Illinois University; Peter Dzwonkoski of the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Marshall A. Best of Viking Press; the reference librarians at Duke University's Perkins Library.