Can you tell that the books are getting shorter as I get to the end of my 25 days? Mrs Fox (2014) by Sarah Hall is certainly short – it is, indeed, the winner of the National Short Story Award 2013. Faber turned it into a book all of its own, with wide margins, huge font, and only 37 pages.
Sarah Hall acknowledges that it was inspired by David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – a 1922 novella that I’ve read a lot, because it was a major part of my DPhil. She also claimed not to have read it.
I’m not going to call her a liar, but Mrs Fox follows the same beats of Lady Into Fox to an astonishing degree. I found a useful blog post that details all of those common factors – but, in brief, a lady turns into a fox. Hall’s version is more visceral than Garnett’s, and certainly more grounded in the now (while Garnett deliberately used an eighteenth-century style for his). Her writing and pacing are excellent, but I found it so hard to judge it – because it is so, so similar to Lady Into Fox in plot. To the point that it’s a bit embarrassing that the competition judges let it win, if I’m honest – and probably the reason that the inspiration is acknowledged. It’s even acknowledged in the book, where the main characters’ surname is Garnett.
So, yes, it’s used in an interesting way to examine the dynamics of a marriage. And thank you Annabel for sending me this copy! But what an interesting case of not-actually-plagiarism.