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...

[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.

[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.