The Fox In the Cupboard
A Memoir
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
What does a London-based single mother do on her holidays? With a couple of weeks unexpectedly free and no chance of going away, Jane Shilling decided she would pursue a childhood ambition and learn to ride. A teacher -- Mrs. Rogers -- was easy to find. What she hadn't reckoned on was that Mrs. Rogers was a master of foxhounds. So began Jane's odd, late-blooming affair with foxhunting: the beginning of a passion that was to take her back to the scenes of her childhood and transform her life in ways that were unexpected, often enchanting, and frequently uncomfortable.
The Fox in the Cupboard is a vivid account of discovering a hidden, beautiful, and frequently comic world of horses and hunting in a small corner of England. It is a book about searching for the place where you belong, about embarking on an adventure at the very point in your life when you thought it was too late. It is also the story of a journey between the shifting worlds of town and country, childhood and adulthood, and a chronicle of the extraordinary characters the author met along the way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this splendid memoir, London Times columnist Shilling details her passion for foxhunting, a slow romance that begins midlife with a desire to ride, which she painstakingly learns to do, then escalates: she buys her own horse and becomes an avid rider and devoted hunter. The lure of foxhunting, a demanding and highly regimented sport with packs of hounds trained from puppyhood, isn't an American penchant (and foxhunting with hounds was recently outlawed in Britain), but Shilling brings the world of the hunt to vivid and bloody life. She lovingly and breathtakingly describes every detail, from the dressing of horse and rider and the wild determination of the hounds to the thrill of the chase, right down to the capture of the "talismanic" brush (the tail of the hunted fox). In telling the history of foxhunting, the breeding of hounds, Shilling's hunt club, her move from the city (London) to the country (Greenwich) and the transcendent emotions she feels, Shilling shifts seamlessly between past and present, personal and political. Readers might find Shilling too glib on the violence of the hunt, which she insists is neither as cruel as bullfighting nor as violent as other means of "controlling" foxes. Few may come away sharing Shilling's hunt politics, but none will fail to appreciate the provocation of her arguments nor fail to enjoy her evocative tale of her love affair with the English countryside in all its feral glory.