Back in late June of this year, upon its premiere—and only shortly before its announced cancellation in mid-August—Amazon Prime’s original series My Lady Jane dropped one of the most unexpected twists of the year on its viewers: Horse Husband! To audiences not acquainted with the books upon which the show is based, the promotional material did little to spell out the complete animal-morphic concept of this alternate-history fantasy romance. So I, like many viewers, was caught off guard when the handsome romantic lead, Guildford Dudley, suddenly shapeshifts into a handsome bay stallion.
Why hold back on advertising a central conceit of the show? Maybe Amazon was worried that “What if Lady Jane Grey wasn’t executed, and also instead of Protestantism the political turmoil of the period was caused by prejudice against people who can turn into animals” was too long-winded of a pitch. It’s a pity then that for whatever reason, be it the non-representative marketing campaign or more generalized viewer disinterest, the show didn’t appear to find its audience, as it boasts among its several other virtues a sword fight with the perfect number of unnecessary backflips and a truly delightful Rob Brydon performance.
Regardless, the horse husband business, surprise though it was, was perhaps inevitable, as it combines the current hot genre trend of romantasy with a more longstanding literary and cultural fixture: the Horse Girl.
The Jane Grey of the show may not be a thoroughbred horse girl in the most strictly traditional sense in that she is not fixated on horses, her romance with horse/man Guildford notwithstanding, but she is characterized with many of the traits that tend to be comorbid with horse girl syndrome, at least in fiction; she’s intelligent, righteous, compassionate, willful, occasionally lacking in self-awareness—all in all more committed to being true to herself than fulfilling society’s expectations of her. Like… gosh, like some kind of animal that’s been domesticated but still retains this wild and passionate nature. Deeply loyal but fiercely independent. Four legs, long flowing hair. Hang on, it’ll come to me.
The horse girl also runs wild outside of the pastures of romantasy; just lately, in T. Kingfisher’s recent A Sorceress Comes to Call, the traumatized and anxious heroine Cordelia’s single solace is Falada, her mother’s beautiful horse whom she’s permitted to ride in brief interludes of privacy and freedom. Classic stuff. Yes, the horse girl is one of our most enduring types of girls, who rears her head more or less constantly in the zeitgeist. Much like the humble house cat, the horse when thrown together with girl-kind turns up many interesting gendered associations. Yet many of these associations that occur around the horse-girl nexus are contradictory, and so already it behooves us to draw some clear lines. Who is and is not properly a horse girl? And why did the horse become such a “girl” thing?
Cards on the table: I was recently assessed as a horse girl by an acquaintance of unimpeachable judgement, and while I was assured that this was not meant as an insult, it did not exactly feel like a compliment. Part of the appellation is merely factual; I’ve had dealings with horses in the past. So, check, that accounts for the “horse” part of the equation, but what kind of “girl” the horse association makes me is another matter altogether. The good kind, I hope, but I worry the signs are a little ambiguous. It seems like a fine occasion to aggressively abrogate my worries using references to books and TV. What do you think of that, Dr. Therapist? Well, the Reactor editors say it’s normal and I should do it!
Kingfisher provides us with an excellent starting point for our equine theodicy. In her wonted fashion, she puts a dark twist on the horse girl trope that seems intent on provoking an ambivalence around the horse as a symbol of personal character on the one hand and class aspiration on the other. Cordelia’s bond with Falada is an outlet for her sensitivity, but but whatever their private dynamic, she understands that Falada also comes with an amount of social cachet, that her mother Evangeline lets her learn to ride so that she will be more attractive to a wealthy husband. Without getting into spoilers, suffice to say that book’s conflict evolves along this fault line between the two aspects of horse girl-ness. Pure hearted and sensitive, yea! Pretentious and social climbing, neigh! (I won’t stop, you can’t make me.)
This facet of the horse as a class signifier is also original to the “Goose Girl” fairy tale recorded in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book that Kingfisher is adapting, in which a princess is bullied by her maid into trading places, including swapping her fine steed, also named Falada, for the maid’s inferior mount. What, a mere lowly maidservant contrive to marry prince? Heaven forfend! (No, no, don’t look at all those other fairytales just off to the right.) There’s some further gruesome business about a decapitation and posthumous conversation carried out in verse, but the main interest here for our purposes is that social class is denoted by the quality of the horse, as to some degree it still is today. The horses who went to the Olympics—who pranced outside the Chateau de Versailles and are christened with names such as “Leipheimer Van’t Verahof” and “Swirly Temptress”—don’t cost the same as the one that lived across the street in your neighbor’s yard, who was named “Mangy Pete,” best known for trying to mange the braids of any flaxen-haired kids who wandered near his pen.
But no horse is cheap, and if anything, in our post-industrialized world the horse’s class connotations are even stronger by dint of horses no longer having any particular utility. They aren’t really livestock, or at least we try not to think of them that way. That is, you might see a cow and think of dairy, or a sheep and think of wool, or a goat and its marvelous capacity to consume anything a person might hope to dispose of. But we tend to avoid associating horses with glue or dog food. Work horses may still be used in commercial ranching, but more and more the horse is represented primarily in sport, and elite sport at that. Per the American Horse Council’s 2023 economic impact study, the “Racing,” “Recreation,” and “Competition” sectors of the horsey economy support a little under 1.5 million jobs, compared with only 86,223 jobs in the “Traditional Work Horses” sector.
Horse girl fiction in contemporary settings may be starting to reflect this elite/sport association more as well. In addition to Kingfisher’s Sorceress, Eliza Jane Brazier’s recent thriller Girls and Their Horses pillories a group of mothers who push their daughters into horseback riding as a kind of class pretention, the new-money mothers wanting to acquire through their daughters the trappings of an elite milieu and the old-money not wanting to lose dominance over those same signifiers that make them, the real elite, better than the nouveau riche who are just rich. All of which, of course, cuts against the acceptable reason to affect a horse girl personality, which is because you simply love horses. What, the money?! No, don’t talk about the money, that’s so gauche! But realistically we know most girls aren’t in the circumstances of Velvet Brown, winning her horse in raffle and proceeding to win the Grand National after training with a vagabond. In periods of greater economic inequality, such as now, the horse is more likely to read as a token of conspicuous consumption, and in such a context the horse girl might read as prissy and vain, a marked departure from the Horse Girl Classic who is typically earthy, shy, sensitive and empathetic in a manner that allows her to connect with her horse.
Between T. Kingfisher’s dark twist on the archetype, Brazier’s satirical thriller, and My Lady Jane’s winking self-awareness about each and every one of its tropes (tell me, is it difficult doing a cut-glass English accent with your tongue lodged in your cheek like that?), creatives appear to be sensing a crust of irony forming between us and the horse girl type. Even when media does embrace the horse girl wholeheartedly, audiences seem given to balk. As Judith Tarr noted, there was some distinct eye-rolling at Galadriel’s horse girl moment in season one of Rings of Power. Maybe that reaction was just idiosyncratic, but then again, getting your feathers ruffled over a Tolkien offshoot glamorizing horses is… an odd choice that does not bespeak much interest in the source material.
That’s not to say we should fret and wring our hands (or depending on your perspective, rejoice) over the prospect that the horse girl will fade from relevance. Hippophilia is simply too fundamental to girlhood, possibly to our entire culture.
Even amid our current bout of cultural side-eye, there’s probably cause to hope that the positive associations of the horse girl still resonate strongly. The horse girl has in her corner, after all, a deep canon of vibrant horse girl literature. The ur horse girl book, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty remains liable to be pressed into the hands of the diagnosed horse curious, alongside the likes of My Friend Flicka and King of the Wind. Though, its popularity might also be ascribed to its usefulness as an instrument for traumatizing unsuspecting children. Reading about Ginger’s death at a tender age broke something inside of me that will never fully heal—and which, frankly, filled me with an abiding rage that still leaks out at odd times. Thanks so much, Mom and Dad.
But my emotional scars are only a testament to Sewell’s writing being as moving as she hoped. Black Beauty marked the modern revival in the practice of writing animal protagonists1, and in dramatic fashion, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time. Beauty’s first-person account of his career and the progressive degradation of his body was not intended by Sewell to be children’s literature, but rather an all-ages appeal for animal welfare. A 1980 edition of the book even added the questionable subtitle “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Horse.” I think that history pretty well gets at the manifest energy of the horse girl: passionate enough to revive an entire vein of literary perspective, earnest to the point of myopia.
So radiant is Black Beauty with horse girl energy, in fact, that despite the original book having no central human protagonist to speak of, a 2020 Disney film adaptation went right ahead and stuck a sad human girl in, transmuting the plot from a 19th-century working horse’s biography into said sad girl’s journey to heal her trauma through equine therapy. Actually, I have not seen the movie; it was removed from Disney+ before I ever knew it existed (the majesty of the streaming era strikes again! That’s right, for a low subscription fee, have access to a house’s entire creative catalogue at any ti—), but the trailer suggests that the film had truly very little in common with Sewell’s classic, aside from the eponymous color of the horse.
Most intriguing of the apparent changes made in this adaptation is that Beauty is transformed from a domestic-born foal into a captured wild mustang, a swerve that recalls an entirely different strain of horse girl fiction, à la Misty of Chincoteague. The taming of the wild horse is a popular trope all on its own, one that appeals to a desire to feel connected to, and be master over, the forces of nature. And hey, there are those contradictions again. Taming nature risks eliminating that original wild appeal, and furthermore, “breaking” a wild horse might feel just plain sad, especially to children with romantic inclinations, who are horse literature’s target audience. Marguerite Henry cleverly threads this needle in Misty, with the siblings Paul and Maureen releasing their pony Phantom back into the wild to live with her feral herd, while keeping her foal. So does Henry have her cake and eat it too, letting the kids display their patience and discipline by taming the horse while ultimately showing deference to her nature by releasing her. The bittersweet ending is the more romantic.
The connection and deference to nature by way of horse is also prevalent in fantasy lit, such as Dia Calhoun’s Firegold, whose “barbaric” Dalriada, distinct from the agrarian valley folk, are very culturally horse-centric, and are conscientiously mutual in their horse-rider relationships. They do not capture and tame their horses but are ritually pair-bonded to members of a wild herd. When protagonist Jonathan declares that his horse Rhohar is free to choose where he goes, he signals his conversion to Dalriada custom. By the same token, the Dalriada are more open to matriarchy, their female leader in the book have been elevated by merit of her bond to the queen horse. Judith Tarr makes the tribal horse-based gendered leadership conceit (a mouthful there; sorry) even more explicit in her Lady of Horses, in which the original horse-rider relationship is formed between a “headstrong girl” and mare, only for this fact to be overwritten in patriarchal myth, girl and mare substituted with a prince and stallion. It’s a tale of patriarchy appropriating and suppressing a bond that is actually original to women—and female horses.
So maybe horse-based elections are not a perfect political system; indeed, the process sounds to have about as much merit as strange women lying in ponds distributing swords. Then again, neither the Lady-of-the-Lake method nor American democracy has yet produced a female chief executive, so….
There is, though, perhaps a touch of what Ursula Le Guin bemoaned as the “cult of women’s knowledge” in this woo-woo nature aspect of the horse girl type, one Le Guin felt patronized women and femininity as naturally intuitive rather than intelligent. Why should horses prefer females to males? (The answer is: they don’t.) Or why, for that matter, should humans in general defer to the judgement of a species whose close-set ears can fit so little grey matter between them?
But we may sidestep this trap neatly by acknowledging horse girl penchants not as an indication of women’s alignment with nature per se, but of the greater allowance our culture makes to women to embrace the romanticism of nature. Men, if you are excited for autumn but feel you can’t express it as ebulliently as you’d like, sound off in the comments.
That Romance of the Bond that is so lovingly on display in Misty of Chincoteague, Firegold, and Lady of Horses is the heart of the horse girl artichoke, when you get down to it. It speaks also to how horses, like romance, became “for girls.” Unabashed love for big, dumb creatures who won’t overtly reciprocate your feelings—I’m talking about horses—takes an emotional gamble that risks looking a bit silly. It isn’t a very masculine-coded behavior, though this was not always the case. Achilles, hero of the Iliad, in addition to crying to his mother with his problems (Achilles’ mother is a sea goddess and his weepiness is therefore likely congenital), maintains a close relationship to his chariot team, including carrying out full-on two-sided conversations with them. Achilles’ forthright emotionality, with both his human and equine companions, is often striking to modern readers who expect heroic masculinity to comport itself more stoically.
Achilles’ bond with his team points us at another aspect of the horse girl’s allure, predominant in fantasy, that it’s a light usurpation of a symbol of knightly masculinity. Éowyn from The Lord of the Rings springs to mind immediately, who affects a full knightly kit to ride into battle, disguised as a male warrior, using the alias “Dernhelm.” “Where will wants not, a way opens,” she declares. Will is supplemented in this case by the great grey steed Windfola, who can carry both a hobbit and a shield maiden the hundred-leagues-and-two distance to battle. Windfola is no help against the Witch King, as things transpire, but even a trained war horse is liable to spook in the face of a monster “nursed with fell meats until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly,” I guess.
Éowyn recedes into delicate ladyhood after that single outing, but Verity Ritchie argues in a fantastic video essay that her episode of knightly drag reflects a queer and trans fairytale tradition, recorded in Andrew Lang’s Violet Fairy Book story “The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy.” In it, three princesses try their hands at becoming knights. The oldest two sisters fail, as tends to happen in fairytale sibling trios, but the youngest princess succeeds by choosing the right steed to carry her to adventure; she takes her father’s own old war horse (who can also speak and advise her), after showing him some TLC to get him back into fighting shape. With her steed’s coaching, the princess conquers her trials, and her emperor father congratulates her on her wisdom in choosing the right horse, “for without his help you would have returned with a bent head and downcast eyes.”
The princess, who continues to adventure, passing as a man called “Fet-Fruners,” does not resent her reliance on her horse companion, either. When eventually she agrees to trade in her old horse for his brother, Sunlight, she does so only on the condition “that he loves me as well as you do.” To which Sunlight, who can of course also speak, answers, “How should I not love you? How should I not be proud to serve a warrior such as you?” Sunlight plays the quintessential horse girl fantasy here, i.e. that her horse could and would love and affirm her. But moreover, their relationship provides Fet-Fruners—and fairytale readers of any gender—with the space to explore a knightly identity premised on deference, tenderness, and gender nonconformity. By the end of the “The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy,” the princess magically transitions into a man, marries another princess, and, presumably, continues to receive excellent advice from Sunlight, gay ally extraordinaire.
The acceptance of overt queerness in culture, especially in kid’s media, is relatively recent and currently undergoing a marked uptick in attempts at censorship, but that fairytale tradition of gender-nonconforming women-knights continues in contemporary young adult fantasies, and is at least as established as Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness series. Alanna of Trebond, like Fet-Fruners, passes herself off as a boy in order to pursue her dream of becoming a knight. Her horse, incidentally, is named Moonlight—likely a coincidence, but a lovely one nonetheless. Esme Symes-Smith has written here at Reactor about their experience reading Alanna as trans/nonbinary, and none other than Pierce herself has stated that Alanna’s identity “has always defied labels” and that she is probably best described as gender-fluid. The title of the third book in the series, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, itself gestures to the relationship between Alanna’s riding and her breaking with the gender conventions of Tortall.
One final girl who pretended to be a boy, aided and abetted by a horse, is the aforementioned Velvet Brown, heroine of National Velvet, who clips her curls and commits some minor document fraud so that she can ride her horse, “The Piebald,” in the Grand National steeplechase. Velvet’s deception is brief, but much like Alanna’s it allows her to compete in an arena that would exclude her and all women. Naturally, Velvet beats all the boys, but much to polite society’s relief, she isn’t out to make a feminist point about it. Velvet is just a horse girl, perhaps literature’s preeminent horse girl, who only wants her horse The Pie to have his best chance at greatness. That means he needs a rider who truly believes in him, which is her. But similar to Misty of Chincoteague’s Paul and Maureen, Velvet remains most focused on her horse’s welfare above her and his competitive success, and she protects The Pie from the publicity that results from their victory rather than capitalizing upon it.
A last notable horse girl trait Velvet exhibits—and I promise by the Great Horse in the Sky that we’re wrapping up—is a noted disinterest in boys, which is connected by the townsfolk of Sussex to her totalizing obsession with horses. The implication is that a girl’s obsessive energies should be channeled towards fulfilling her predestined heteronormative social role. Boys, marriage, babies! Fourteen is a perfectly good age to be thinking about these things! The witchy Vasya in Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale receives a similar diagnosis from the villagers of Lesnaya Zemlya, who recognize that she is less interested in her betrothed, Kyril, than she is in his fabulous horse, Ogon, when they both roll up for the wedding feast. Vasya’s snap judgement only proves reasonable, of course; Kyril is an unpleasant man, while Ogon is a very good boy. (Don’t be deceived by the book’s title. “The Nightingale” is a horse, this is a horse girl book.)
For Velvet Brown, Fet-Fruners, and their ilk, horses are a means to escape the pastures of demure femininity—and chance greatness. It’s probably not coincidental then that the two most horse-aligned Disney princesses, Mulan and Belle, are also the least motivated by romance. Their larger personal ambitions just seem to make a horse affinity natural—and where, pray tell, are the girls getting such grand ideas that they could aspire to more than being someone’s little wife? Well, Belle during Beauty and the Beast’s opening number seems to be getting them from the Blue Fairy Book. If she’d borrowed the Violet Fairy Book instead, who knows what might have happened. Possibly Philippe would have become even more central to her journey.
My sister, wise and insightful, points out to me furthermore that Velvet Brown and most other horse girls have a close relationship to a specific horse—The Pie, Sunlight, Moonlight, Solovey, Rhoha, etc.—that displaces the need for a human romance with its intimacy, and without the girl incurring any of the restrictive expectations of a heteronormative marriage. It is a queer relationship in the academic sense. In fact, so prevalent is this particular reading of the horse girl that there is evidently a whole academic tradition of moralizing the “pony-mad girls” of fiction and reality as subjects with a displaced or deviant sexual fixation on horses that could derail their transitions into “normal” heterosexual adolescents2. So there you have it, we asked “What’s a horse girl?” and we got our answer: Perverts, Your Honor!
Which brings us full circle back to our Lady Jane Grey (We did it, Reactor editors! High five!), who also ticks this particular box, declaring at the start of the narrative that she hopes to make a living independently and perhaps, *gasp*, never marry. When she is railroaded into a marriage against her will, does she escape on horseback? You bet she does! Alright, the horse may just be the vehicle du jour of 1553, but when Jane is ultimately cozened to the altar, she does learn that her bridegroom spends his daylight hours as a literal horse. This doesn’t put a damper on the marriage so much as it gives Jane and Guildford something to connect over; they’re both a bit different.
The animal bridegroom is itself a classic fairytale trope, as seen not just in Beauty and the Beast but its Blue Fairy Book neighbors such as East of the Sun and West of the Moon and The Black Bull of Norroway. So yes, “horse husband” was probably an inevitable romantasy development—and shall evidently return in a new form in May of next year, mark your calendars—but given the horse’s history of queering female identity, especially in fantasy, it’s a shame that My Lady Jane can’t commit to taking its heroine somewhere a little more radical.
There’s a needle drop early in My Lady Jane’s first episode, as Jane and her friend Susannah frolic and gossip to the tunes of the Tegan and Sarah cover of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” The editing skirts one particular famous lyric though: “You’ve got your mother in a whirl. She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.” It’s a noticeable omission, though not a shocking one. Jane, after all, isn’t that kind of rebel rebel. Her face isn’t even really a mess. In fact, her femininity, while a departure from the frippery of the 1500s, is pretty aligned with the standard, staid middle-class femininity of now. She says she doesn’t want to marry? Well, she’ll get a husband and learn to love him. We’ve seen that one before too.
That’s not to say I think the horse girl shouldn’t have a (hetero) romance. My own favorite horse girl in all of media right now is Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers, who is completely obsessed with boys. Boys and horses, those are pretty much her two exclusive interests. But what makes Tina great, how she reminds me of my own early (and late) adolescence, is that her obsessions far outstrip the limits of good taste. She writes in her journal about the hot boys in her school turning into zombies and touching each other’s butts. She bike-locks herself to her favorite carousel horse, Mr. Goiter, to save him from demolition. She’s cringe—and she’s happy. The message that you should love your own freakiness will always land harder when the freak levels are actually high. You tacky thing.
Living as we do in a period when women and queer people’s social roles and right to self-determine are getting an alarmingly thorough re-litigation by a pack of slavering senescent ghouls, it’s nice—necessary, even—to have a big, girly, gay outlet from time to time. If said outlet features powerful stomping hooves and sort of alarming teeth, all the better. But what mostly matters is the weird and wild places the horse girl gets to go—where horse lovers of any gender get to go. And if an actual flesh-and-blood mount is beyond our budget, we can always find inspiration, and a more economical fantasy, in the pages of a book.
In short: Oh God, give us horses, give us horses…
