The Fox in the Cupboard: A Memoir - Hardcover

"Anybody who wants to know why the English are so crazy on the subject of foxhunting -- both those who are for it and those who are against -- can hardly do better than to read Jane Shilling's funny, touching and graceful memoir, which will also tell him (or her) a lot about the well-known fact that the English are horse crazy as well, and about the abiding (and apparently changeless) charms of rural English life."-- Michael Korda, author of "Horse People"

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.