SOURCE: Osborn, Marijane. “Complexities of Gender and Genre in Lawrence's The Fox.” Essays in Literature 19, no. 1 (spring 1992): 84-97.

In the following essay, Osborn offers a compositional history of “The Fox” and asserts that “as Lawrence uses an actual fable of the Aesopian kind to give form to elements borrowed from his own life, the result is a fiction rich in ambivalence about sexual roles and played out by characters luminous as mythic beings.”

The point of recognition seems to be also a point of identification, where a hidden truth about something or somebody emerges into view.

—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity

“There he is!” she cried involuntarily, as if terribly startled.

—D. H. Lawrence, “The Fox”

Though F. R. Leavis's evaluation of Lawrence's novella “The Fox” as “one of the supreme things among the major tales” (332) carries conviction, his identification of “youthful love” as the theme is so...