A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age in the aftermath of World War I. Unjustly suspected of having had a hand in the murder of a young girl, Augustine takes refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives. There his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism.
Moving into an upmarket new home in Leeds, rising radio star Matt Harper is shocked to find the skeleton of a small child in the attic. His grisly discovery takes him back to the summer of 1969, when he lived with his aunt only a few streets away, reawakening dim, vaguely disturbing memories from his childhood. While Detective Charlie Peace heads up the nominal police investigation into the bones, Matt's unease leads him to revisit the past in an attempt to solve the mystery himself.
When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" was hailed as a path-breaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar's approach.
