The Horse Dealer’s Daughter — What D. H. Lawrence Leaves Unsettled

Lawrence believed that a feeling could come from a part of a person deeper than the conventions by which it would usually be judged.

That conviction ran through his writing about relationships. The place of the body and sexuality in those relationships was especially important to him.

D. H. Lawrence lived from 1885 to 1930, in a period when writing openly about sexual desire could bring censorship. His work drew controversy in his lifetime and long afterwards. The best-known obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover took place in Britain in 1960, thirty years after his death.

A Miner’s Son and a Former Schoolteacher’s Son

Lawrence grew up with a coal miner for a father and a mother who had worked as a teacher. Their different worlds mattered to him. His early loyalties and ambitions were closely bound to his mother and the refinement he associated with her.

His writing also found something to value in the physical life and plain speech he associated with his father. Both claims on him can be felt in the way he writes about a room, a body or the work people do.

What Comes Together in The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

Refinement and physical roughness are both present in the story. Sometimes the effect is disturbing because the two are so close to each other.

The people at its centre are the children of a horse dealer, and the story comes to rest on the daughter, Mabel Pervin.

It begins with the family considering what each of them will do next. Their late father, Joseph Pervin, had once done well in the horse trade. After Mabel’s mother died, Mabel became attached to her father, but his remarriage changed their relationship.

The business has failed and the last horses are going. Mabel’s brothers Joe, Fred Henry and Malcolm talk about where she can go, including to her sister Lucy. Their concern feels more practical than affectionate.

Jack Fergusson, a doctor, comes by. He seems to take little notice of Mabel and yet watches her. Later, while she is tending her mother’s grave, they catch sight of one another. The brief encounter unsettles him.

When Jack is on his rounds, he sees Mabel walk into a pond and go under. He wades in and manages to bring her out. At her house, he wraps her in a blanket and gives her whisky.

As she comes round, Mabel asks whether he loves her. His surprise does not stop her from insisting that he does. She kisses his legs and cries. What he comes to feel is hard to separate from pity, desire and the shock of having brought her out alive.

Things in the Story That Carry More Than One Meaning

Several physical details gather meaning as the story goes on.

• The pond — a place where Mabel goes intending to die, and from which she comes out into a life she had not imagined.
• The horses — signs of wealth, strength and sexuality. Descriptions of the brothers also have an animal quality that can make their prospects seem bleak.
• The whisky — something Jack uses to revive Mabel as both of them begin to see the encounter differently.
• The wet clothes — removing them can suggest a break with the life Mabel had been living.

A Modernist Story

The story belongs to the period of literary modernism. The attention it pays to what a moment feels like from the inside is more revealing than any label.

Lawrence gives physical feeling, desire and confusion as much weight as the moral account a character might want to give of an action. The story lets those explanations fall behind what the body is already doing.

That is what gives the final scene its force. Love and fear can both be there, and Lawrence does not make the reader decide that one cancels out the other.

The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

• Author — D. H. Lawrence
• First published — 1922