The Fox Woman by Nalbro Bartley (1928)
By Francis Booth | On March 12, 2025 | Updated May 25, 2025 | Comments (0)
Journalist, short story writer, and lecturer Nalbro Isadora Bartley (1888 – 1952) published at least twenty-five novels between 1919 and 1934, sometimes releasing two in a year. The Fox Woman (1928) was her 19th novel.
At the start of The Fox Woman, whose cover blurb says, “The Fox Woman ever takes but never gives,” we are in the 1880s. Gender-neutrally-named “tomboy” Stanley is only seven but already her widowed father, Millard Ames, is in awe of her.
“There was something about Stanley that he could not gainsay— something so persuasive yet determined that he found himself yielding to her slightest request.” Stanley’s mother died in childbirth and her father has since dedicated himself to her, as his late wife’s friend Maggie has dedicated herself to him, though with no expectation of reciprocity.
“I love you, Millard. I’m content to serve you. I know I’m absurd when I try to think of romance. I’m not the sort men fall in love with.” Maggie Aydelotte, referred to by Stanley as Tante Aydelotte, is her “self-appointed overseer and secretary” and refers to Stanley as a “tiny fox woman,” in reference to the story of the (male but gender-fluid) Japanese fox god.
The fox god who changes himself into a beautiful woman and apparently comes to the rescue whenever trouble threatens or a boon is asked . . . but really, she is searching for thrills! It’s the best simile I’ve come upon for Stanley. The fox woman has a clever heart but the good she does never outweighs the evil she causes. She will bide her time to have her own way. Apparently she may be maligned, even self-sacrificing, but she turns events to her liking or else escapes from distasteful situations. She so dominates and maneuvers the lives of those about her yet remaining the innocent, misunderstood individual, that she escapes dénouements. Her aim is to have power—and to be amused . . .
From an early age, Stanley’s was “a masculine mind with keen feminine intuitions. Just as she reveled in beauty and was, herself, a thing of motion and loveliness, so she reveled in power, in any game of playing politics to bring about the desired result.” By the age of twelve, but looking fifteen, Stanley writes in her diary, “I have become a woman. My darling father does not realize this. I shall have him take me abroad — I do not believe that I wish an American husband.”
Her father dutifully takes Stanley to Paris, though his legal business is failing and he has little money; Tante has gone to the Midwest to become a teacher, having given up on marrying Millard Ames. Father and daughter stay in Paris until she really is fifteen and has still never been to school, but has “a proposal of marriage, a wealth of golden hair and the ability to execute fancy dances in a manner equal to that of a professional.
She had become a sparkling little cosmopolitan.” Having made sure that she would never have a second mother, Stanley “now focused her thoughts upon a husband. He must be handsome, rich, talented, and as devoted and deluded as her father who was to live with them for always. They must travel a great deal, and have a brownstone-front house in New York and perhaps a country place in the Berkshire towns.”
Stanley’s father dies when she is still fifteen and she wishes he had waited until she had found a husband but soon gets over him. “Stanley reordered her small world and was not unmindful that she looked well in black.”
Tante returns as Stanley’s guardian and tells her she must learn to live on very little money and attend her boarding school, Miss Masters’s Seminary for Young Ladies.
Bah, she hated the very thought of it—three years of namby-pamby monotony . . . yet she was penniless and only fifteen, quite alone save for this strangely loyal soul . . . she must make the best of it. One cannot always remain fifteen. And she had been born with the wisdom of fifty.
But Stanley hates the conformity of school; she is an individual not a conformist. “I won’t get-up early and eat scorched porridge and say prayers and walk and study and mend and scrub—I wish that I had eloped with anyone.”
What follows for the next few chapters of the long novel is a kind of bildungsroman of Stanley adapting herself to and then leaving school, trying to become an actress and becoming engaged to the besotted Blair Britton. And she continues to toy with Blair while juggling the attentions of the wealthy but much older and previously married Lee Van Zile.
All the time Stanley was playing a fascinating game of fox. She knew better than to surrender to Van Zile instanter—the ardent old chap had begged her to marry him three days after they met. To have caused another seven-day wonder in eloping with an elderly upstate millionaire and abandoning young Britton to heartbreak and drink would not have given Stanley the self-righteous thrill of victory she meant to obtain.
Stanley does, cruelly, foxily reject Blair and marry Van Zile, though she insists on him remodelling the gloomy old pile, the “red brick fortress,” where he lives. She soon comes to regret her decision, but understands it was inevitable given her true nature. “I had a greedy jewel-box instead of a flesh-and blood heart,” she tells Tante. But now Stanley is pregnant.
“I’m wondering if he’ll be like Lee, a monotonous little soul sure to get seven per cent on investments, or if he will be like me —cheating and selfish and covered with a veneer of smiles.” Tante realises that Stanley wants a son to have someone to dominate as she gets older and “as an antidote to age and the inevitable ending of her sex appeal.”
Stanley sees motherhood as another challenge for her to master; “she wanted to be as successful in the role as she had been in those of fiancée, artiste, old man’s bride.” Especially since she is assuming her husband will not last long; “It is not likely that his child will know him,” she says to Tante. “As for Van, he could not last five years. Already his step was uncertain and his blood pressure high.”
When the baby is stillborn, Stanley has even more power over her husband. “If she had made Van Zile adore her by giving him a child she had made him an abject slave by having lost the child. His pity as well as his pocketbook were laid at her restless little feet.” Stanley comes to hate Van Zile and treat him cruelly.
“Was it an inherited taint which caused this ruthless deceit and wilfulness? Some people are born with defective limbs or organs—she was born with defective character.”
Stanley becomes pregnant again and loses this baby too; the doctors don’t tell her but warn Tante that Stanley not to try to have a third birth. But without Stanley’s knowledge, Tante uses her own guile and Van Zile’s money to “adopt” a baby boy whose mother has died; they present it to Stanley as her own son, “Ames Van Zile, the millionaire baby, as the evening papers had it.”
As time moves on, Stanley becomes the mature, society lady and charitable patroness as the “girlish, ethereal charm that had deceived Blair and won her husband was replaced by a somewhat substantial, matronly beauty.” The novel now becomes mainly the story of Stanley’s son, as he grows up and marries the exotic Carol, of whom Stanley initially disapproves. But in the end, Blair returns and offers to marry the aging fox woman.
“We must marry but let us not try to be in love. Rather comfortable at our age, don’t you agree ?”
“I’m not sure but what I am in love ” She was thinking what a graceful retreat this afforded her. Tante in a nursing-home, good old Tante, after all— Blair and herself traveling leisurely on the Continent with May spent in London.
She could refer to her married son and to her lovely daughter-in-law, be proud of Blair’s distinguished white hair and vibrant voice even when ordering dinners. She could write interesting, self-sacrificing letters to Ames and send Carol beautiful trifles from Paris.
Sometimes they could come back and Ames’s children would find in her a doting, story-book grandmother. Perhaps Carol would not mind her toying with them for a few weeks. (She would bring them such wonderful clothes and make such a generous will.)
All the time she would have someone who understood her moods and knew her past, as well as appreciated her abilities. Blair would be ready to pick up her fan whenever she ordered him to; in time he would become docile and rather fussy about draughts and diets.
No matter how bravely he might speak now she was content to bide her time. They would make pleasant contacts and she could reminisce inaccurately but romantically—yes, it might be best to marry this Blair . . . moreover he would not be too expensive!
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Other novels by Nalbro Bartley
Her previous novels included The Gorgeous Girl, 1920, “A story of contrasts — the story of one girl whose gorgeousness is all on the outside, plainly visible; and another, whose beauty and fineness are hidden within.”
Having married in her mid-twenties, Beatrice feels “the dissatisfaction not over this first year of married life but at the twenty-seven years as a Gorgeous Girl, the disappointment at not having some vital impelling thing to do.” She resolves to become another kind of woman, a very advanced woman for 1920.
She would now be an advanced woman, intellectual, daring; she would allow her stunted abilities to have definite expression. Either she would find a new circle of friends or else swerve the course of the present circle into an atmosphere of Ibsen, Pater, advanced feminine thought, and so on––with Egyptology as a special side line. She would even become an advocate of parlour socialism, perhaps. She would encourage languid poets and sarcastic sex novelists with matted hair and puff satin ties. She would seek out short-haired mannish women with theories and oodles of unpublished short stories, and feed them well, opening her house for their drawing-room talks.
The previous year Bartley had published another novel about a woman seeking her way in the modern world. A Woman’s Woman is about a woman torn between love for her wealthy businessman husband and a bohemian artist, which examines the societal pressures on the modern woman. At the age of thirty-five, with two children Sylvia rebels.
“Little by little she emerges from her home-keeping shell and joins one woman’s club after another. She is sent as [a] delegate to conventions, starts a woman’s exchange and finally becomes one of the most prominent women in the country.”
But at the end she returns to her married life; surprisingly perhaps, the reviewer in the Chicago Tribune did not approve: “the reader is expected to rejoice as the spirited heroine, for love’s sake, resumes the making of fish balls and the washing of dishes.” And in 1926 Bartley had published Her Mother’s Daughter, which contains the character Dodo Grant, more a garçonne than a flapper, more Radclyffe Hall than Zelda Fitzgerald.
Dodo Grant, her closely cut black head nodding vivaciously as she gave orders as to the seating. Dodo’s was the vitality of the Murillo type, dark, inscrutable eyes and a sallow, healthy skin. She stood out among a thousand of young things—the boyish, athletic type that could wear untrimmed hats pushed far back on her clipped head and say timely, clever things whenever conversation lagged.
It seemed natural for Dodo to smoke incessantly and wear knickers for walking. One thought of her as a sexless, delightful comrade whose main interests were golf and dogs and social settlement work. No one remarked at Dodo’s appearing at a dance in a severe white frock and upon all other occasions in mannish tailleurs and swashbuckling neckties centered by a sparkling cock made of diamonds. No one anticipated the day when Dodo Grant would marry.
Nevertheless, in the chapter “Dodo’s Secret,” we find that Dodo is secretly straight and has been infatuated with a married man, over whom she has been through a “rocky time.” “When I was nineteen his wife heard about it and made a row. She always does, they say. I was rather a wreck. No one has suspected that I was the romantic kind—I’ve never been anything but pals with the boys.”
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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
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