O marvellous hive mind that is my flist

[gillo]

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

Comments

[oursin]

It's just too late - 1932 - but in Have His Carcase Harriet Vane feels strangely moved by the thought of Lord Peter on horseback.

I suspect that the novels of Ethel M Dell would provide a rich hunting ground, and of course the famous popular cultural referent involving men mastering horses in the 1920s would be EM Hull's The Sheik (1919).

On a higher cultural level, I'm trying to recollect whether there are any Grandcourt/Gwendolen scenes in Daniel Deronda that don't also involve her being mounted and an excellent horsewoman.

[gillo]

It's a really common trope, I know. I've been pointed at a very useful article which might lead me to a useful book, but I am currently in Hitchin, staying with a friend and will not be able to get to the university library until Saturday.

It's only a minor point, but it's a useful one because Woolf and Holtby use the same thing, both clearly in an ultra-intertextual way, so it makes a useful chunk of the essay - but I must have the citationz!!!

Thank you.

[oursin]

Is there any way I can be of help? I'm very sorry if I missed out a citation.

Laura

[gillo]

Bless you for coming here to reply. It's not that you missed out a citation - I really enjoyed your post - it's just that the tutor doesn't like web citations and requires "real book" references as far as possible. Thanks to the wonderful people here and on FB I have now collected together enough material so I can discuss Woolf's silly incident and Holtby's metatextual take on it.

Thank you so much.

[oursin]

No problem! I'm glad you enjoyed the post.

I'm probably about to ride off at a complete tangent, but in case it's of any help, I had a vague recollection of horse/horse-riding metaphors being used to describe literature in the 1920s and 1930s so I went off to have a look and located an online edition of Rebecca West's essay on "The Tosh Horse", 1922, New Statesman, Sept. 16th. Reprinted in Fleet Street: An Anthology of Modern Journalism. Ed. W. W. Cobbett and Sidney Dark. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932. 188-193.

http://archive.org/stream/fleetstreet035345mbp#page/n215/mode/2up It's not got anything about horse-riding heroes: it's about authors who ride the "tosh horse". Virginia Woolf also used a horsey metaphor to describe attitudes towards life and literature:

In "Middlebrow" Woolf defined the highbrow as "the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea," and a

[gillo]

I really need to find a way to fit that into my essay! Thank you again. My tutor misses a great deal by deriding the intellectual potential of the internet.