ABSTRACT
In her late-life collection of autobiographical essays, Happy Days, Irish author Edith Somerville asserts that in Ireland "there is still a vein of primitive sorcery, and one can there meet with an acceptance of marvels that has not yet faded away". This chapter focuses on Somerville and Martin Ross's fourth novel, The Silver Fox, and explores the interconnection of the political and sexual dynamics at play within its more fantastic elements. The Silver Fox is set amidst the political and cultural tension between nineteenth-century English imperial ambition and the private and social traditions of the native Irish, including their superstitious belief in the novel's spectral title character, the silver fox. The Gothic tensions of Somerville and Ross's The Silver Fox are arguably a continuation of a well-worn literary path that the two authors commenced with their debut novel, An Irish Cousin, in 1889.
