According to F. R. Leavis, who dominated literary criticism for many years in England, the only modern writer fitting into the great tradition of English fiction was D. H. Lawrence. This view was expressed many years ago, but it was absorbed thoroughly at Cambridge by Lyn Ludowyke, the Professor who dominated the field of English at university in Sri Lanka, and who taught generations of future academics. So, that was the view that stuck in Sri Lanka for many decades with, until relatively recently, all the academics who taught English Literature in our universities, and our Training Colleges too, being products of the even greater tradition associated with that splendid scholar. So, given the practice of sticking to previously studied texts, The Odour of Chrysanthemums' and The Rocking Horse Winner' continue on many syllabuses, as does the poem ‘Snake’, sometimes explained to unsuspecting minds solely in terms of phallic symbolism.

I suspect the open – for that time at least – accounts of sexuality had something to do with Lawrence's exalted reputation in those distant days. This was strengthened in the sixties with some powerful films, stressing aspects of personal relations that were fashionable then, though Lawrence himself seems to have been much less explicit in the first decades of this century, when simple sexuality was circus enough.

Thus, The Fox, a subtle exploration of complex emotional ties between, first, two women living together and then, between one of those women and a young man who joins them (with resulting tensions between the other woman and these two, individually and together),was presented in celluloid as being unmistakably about lesbians.