The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter Study Guide

D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, a coal mining town in the county of Nottinghamshire, England. He studied teaching at University College, Nottingham, where he began writing his first short stories and first novel, ultimately published as The White Peacock in 1911. In 1912 he met and began an affair with Frieda Weekley, a married German woman living in England. Two years later, once Frieda had obtained a divorce, she and Lawrence married. During World War II they suffered prejudice as a result of Frieda’s nationality. Between 1913 and 1920, Lawrence published three of his most famous novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920), which treat Lawrence’s favored themes of sexual passion, individualism, family dynamics, and the impact of social class on human destiny. Lawrence’s most famous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was first published in 1928, in private limited edition due to the work’s sexual content. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in 1930. When Penguin Books tried to publish an uncensored English version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 in the U.K., they were prosecuted for obscenity but acquitted, after which the book sold millions of copies.

“The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” was written during World War I (1914‑1918) and published shortly after the war ended. As an Englishman married to a German woman, D. H. Lawrence experienced prejudice during the war because the English were fighting the Germans. After living for several years under oppressive conditions in Cornwall during the war, he and his wife Frieda were thrown out in 1917 under the Defense of the Realm Act, a wartime law that encouraged censorship and regulated or illegalized various normal behaviors. It is possible that the prejudice Lawrence and Frieda suffered while in Cornwall contributed to the depressive atmosphere and negative depiction of social constraints on behavior found in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.” Moreover, the year before Lawrence composed “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” his novel The Rainbow (1915) was prosecuted for obscenity. That D. H. Lawrence continued to write sexually frank stories such as “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” after The Rainbows prosecution suggests his personal opposition to the censorious, conformist wartime mood.

D. H. Lawrence is a famous Modernist writer. Modernism is a literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked by its rejection of old literary forms and subjects. The depiction of sexual desire in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” is modernist because it rejects the prudery and repression of the previous Victorian era (1837‑1901). As in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” with its depiction of Mabel’s physical attraction to Fergusson, Lawrence’s early novel The Rainbow (1915) contains frank depictions of female sexual desire. Likewise, Lawrence’s most famous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), takes human sexuality as its theme, positively representing a cross-class adulterous relationship between Lady Chatterley and her groundskeeper Mellors. Both Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rainbow were at various times prosecuted for obscenity due to their sexual content. Another Modernist novel famously prosecuted for obscenity is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), due to its depiction of masturbation.