ISBN 978 07206 1217 2
Fiction
paperback
£8.95
June 2006

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

Violette Leduc

With a new forewordby Deborah Levy

Translated from the French by Derek Coltman

‘When a transparent, secret, provoking, enthralling book appeared — Violette Leduc’s L’Asphyxie — I was startled: a writer had emerged. Camus, Cocteau, Genet and Sartre shared my emotion. From the first, we expected much of Violette Leduc.’ — Simone de Beauvoir

When the extraordinary memoir La Bâtarde was published in 1964, the literary world was impressed and scandalized by the book’s explicit account of lesbian love. And its author, Violette Leduc, became an instant celebrity, with 150,000 copies of the book sold in its first year.

Her short novel The Lady and the Little Fox Fur first publihsed in 1967,deals with a different side of life, focusing on a lonely old woman whose fortune and dignity are gone. Driven to despair she discovers peace of mind by forming a strange and touching relationship with the everyday objects of the city. Written with the same passion and stunningly observed attention to detail as La Bâtarde, it is a perfectly formed minor masterpiece.

Recent reviews:

'To enter the world of Violette Leduc's "lady" is to step into a place where each sensation is digested morsel by morsel, where clothes have opinions and pieces of furniture have individual personalities - but in which large themes of loneliness, hunger and hope are distilled and counted out like the coffee beans with which the heroine measures out her poverty. Leduc, a friend of Jean Genet and admired by De Beauvoir and Camus, recalls Beckett and perhaps Gogol in her exploration of the bitter comedy of the marginalised. Here, an old woman, ashamed to be "breathing the oxygen meant for people who had spent their day working", walks the streets of Paris to stave off gnawing hunger. Each step is an ordeal of repressed desire - for food and for recognition of her existence. When she picks a fox fur out of a bin, the creature appears to offer the chance of money. Her attempt to sell it leads first to humiliation but then to salvation. What could be an utterly dispiriting, larded-with-pathos portrayal of old age is fashioned through Leduc's expressionist eye into a forceful affirmation of the human spirit'. – Guardian 02/12/06

'Violette Leduc was known, and her writing was admired, by Camus, Beauvoir, Sartre, Cocteau and Genet, so you'd expect her to have written fierce books about society, morality and sexuality. So she did, most notably her bestselling autobiography, La Bâtarde. But this novella from 1965 is an impressionistic oddity, about a poor, lonely, very hungry, unnamed old woman aimlessly walking the streets of Paris. There's an implied critique of society, which rushes around in proximity to the woman without ever stopping to notice how desperate she is - but it is only implied. We are entirely caught up in the woman's interior life, an existence that she compulsively counts out in coffee beans, which are pretty much all she owns until the day she finds a discarded, mangy old fox fur and makes friends with it.She may be senile or just delirious with hunger; her sense impressions and memories are jumbled. As she crosses a road, the car exhausts give off a scent of mimosa that transports her back to a country convalescence 40 years earlier. In the next sentence, back in the present tense, "the mimosa was falling like snow." The disjunction between her reality and ours can be heartbreaking. In an empty bus-station waiting room she finds some orange peel and a blackened match, and thinks, "they must be kind people... since they left her these things to remember them by." The narrow focus and the compactness of Leduc's prose mean that, line for line, this book is as richly humane as anything else you're likely to read'.– Independent 31/12/06


The French author Violette Leduc’s memoir ‘La Batarde’ earned her the praise of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir when published in 1964. The following year she followed it up with this short novel that became a bestseller in France at the time. It captures a twilight world of dereliction and suffering as an impoverished old woman walks the streets of Paris. An old fox fur, her only companion, it acts as a talisman against loneliness and desolation. At times she seems to become part of thelandscape around her and the streets take on a sinister aspect of malevolent intensity. Time is measured by the counting of coffee beans and the observation of daily routines around her and it acts as a reminder of mortality: “Time was a necklace: each bead a gleam on her grave”. Reflecting on her long-lost youth she realises that “the pavement was as old as she was” and the street becomes “all the minutes, the seconds of her existence.” The tone is melancholy and dream-like. Hunger leads to hallucinations and the objects around her become invested with an almost supernatural significance. In tune with the turning of the seasons, the months take on an almost human form for her, as February becomes “a sullen captive in the afternoon mist.” Echoes of Proust re-occur throughout. Sense impressions trigger submerged memories: cars give off “a scent of mimosa: the mimosa of a convalescence at Menton forty years before.” Paris becomes transfigured in much the same way the city’s Surrealists invested magic in the mundane. Finally, in desperation, the old lady tries to sell the fox fur but to no avail. It only serves to push her further down the path to disintegration and madness. It’s a sensual reading of the city that’s poetic and moving and a study in isolation of someone who succeeds partly in transcending the harsh reality of city life: a necessary glimpse of life lived at the margins, below the ever-present “roar of the overhead Metro.” Paul Fitzpatrick, Aesthetica Magazine






VIOLETTE LEDUC was born in Arras in 1907, the illegiimate daughter of a servent girl. Spending a lonely childhood mainly in boarding school she then left for Paris at the age of 19 where she began work at the Plon Publishing house. She wrote her first novel l'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) under the encouragement of De Beauvoir and Maurice Sachs which was then published by Camus for the editions Gallimard in 1945. She wrote seven other novels and a second part (La Folie en tete) to the acclaimed memoir La Bâtarde and died of breast cancer in 1972.