The Fox In the Cupboard: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Jane Shilling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When the author, a British single mother looking for a new hobby, took up the sport of foxhunting, she had no idea she would wind up in the middle of an international controversy. A sport with a long and venerable history (it dates back at least to 1327, when the rules were first codified), foxhunting came under criticism a few years ago from animal-rights activists who claimed that the hunt was not only cruel to the animals but also a barbaric and uncivilized activity, demeaning to humanity. Eventually, early in 2005, the sport was outlawed in Britain. She may have come in at the end, but Shilling quickly grew to know and love foxhunting and its quirky, eccentric subculture. Her book is an eye-opening introduction to the sport--not a defense of foxhunting but a thought--provoking acknowledgment of a vanishing part of British history. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (September 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743276817
• ISBN-13: 978-0743276818
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing look at the contemporary world of fox hunting, January 21, 2007

By 

Rivercat "rivercat0338" (San Ramon, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fox In the Cupboard: A Memoir (Hardcover)

As an American horse-mad child I consumed all the Pullein-Thompson and "Jill" pony books I could get my hands on, but the culture of riding to hounds, with its arcane language and fastidious customs, remained opaque and perplexing. Jane Shilling is an outsider herself, bringing the reader along on her journey as a middle-aged single mother attempting to learn to ride and join a hunt. While the politics of hox hunting cannot be avoided, Shilling wisely does not make them the center of her story, but rather lays out the situation as she observes it and ultimately lets the reader decide for herself.