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

[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.)