Horses for courses

[altariel]

Wonderful well-read f'list, can you help gillo with the following question that has come up in the course of her studies?

I am deep in The Essay currently, and working on a section about literary references. One I'm finding interesting is the heroine meeting the hero when he is on a horse - astride the mighty stallion, pulsing with power etcetc. Both Woolf and Holtby use it in the books I'm working on (Orlando and South Riding) but in interestingly different ways.

Can anyone think of any other examples, before 1928? I know about Jane Eyre, and there's another good one in Sense and Sensibility, but I'd like a few others if possible, especially in popular literature.

Original post is here.

Comments

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

Have no texts at hand to check, but there shurely must be bucketloads in Georgette Heyer? All those Regency bucks? The earliest of those just about squeeze under the 1928 wire...

[gillo]

I can think of a couple, but mostly in much later books. I don't wholly envision Virginia curling up to enjoy a Heyer, though - do you?

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I can envision dear Virginia curling up with anything that could be described as popular literature, quite honestly!

[gillo]

She was extraordinarily bitchy about Winifred Holtby! I'm sure she felt popularity was beneath anyone with the soul of a true artist.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

Women in Love is the classic one for this, although I don't know if this meets the appropriate criteria.

Following up the Georgette Heyer reference above, The Talisman Ring deconstructs this trope. However, I think Georgette Heyer has more first encounters between hero and heroine with the hero driving rather than riding, although there is often a riding scene later on.

In Eight Cousins by Louisa Alcott, Rose first encounters her cousins mounted on ponies, and drawing a cart, which she initially mistakes for a circus procession. In the sequel, Rose in Bloom, the loss of the heroine's first love interest is occasioned by his drunkenness leading him to be incapable of managing his horse. Laurie in Little Women is supposed to be a good rider, and Amy fakes riding by putting a saddle on an old tree.

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

In Women in Love, the Manly Lawrencian Hero is actually astride a mare, which he then fights into submission and makes a remark along the lines of "oh, they really like that".

(D.H.Lawrence and I don't really get along...)

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I loathe D. H. Lawrence's work and that scene is one of the reasons why. I threw my copy of Women in Love against the wall in disgust with the book and its statements about what women really want. I had to bluff my way through a seminar on Kangaroo because I failed to finish it as it bored the heck out of me, as well as annoying the pants off me.

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

I was lucky enough to take my EngLit exams with a professor who was a specialist in modernist literature but had a great sense of humour when it came to Lawrence, so he just let me rant... ;)

(I never read anything beyond Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and part of Sons and Lovers - after which I gave up and started a Jane Austen re-read to cleanse my brain.)

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether an unmounted hero first meeting his lady when he single-handedly stops a bolting horse from running her chaise over a cliff would do? If it would, apply to Chapter V of Robert Bage's Hermsprong, which everyone who hasn't read ought to do.