Five books for the equine set

Tory Bilski is a travel writer based in Connecticut. She writes primarily about Iceland - its people, horses, and history. Her new book is Wild Horses of the Summer Sun: A Memoir of Iceland.

At LitHub Bilski tagged "five books that may help explain the relationship between women and horses," including:

Beryl Markham, The Splendid Outcast: African Stories

Maybe it should come as no surprise that one of the first female aviators was also a horse trainer, in fact, the first licensed female horse trainer in colonial Kenya, where she grew up. The book is a collection of eight stories written in the 1940s that were gathered together for publication in 1987. The first three are pure horse stories, and no one writes better than Markham about her horses and their full-throated personalities. Like the Greek gods, they are prideful, vengeful, jealous, brave. She doesn’t leave it there, however; she feels the need to vacillate between anthropomorphizing her horses and then doubting herself for even suggesting such mawkishness.

The story “Something I Remember” ends with her favorite horse returning to the site where years before he was bloodily defeated and permanently wounded in a fight with another horse. Markham writes, “He only stood there like a man with a dream.” However, then, she pulls back: “That is only the way it seemed to me.... I suspect that he had come there only to catch the last warmth of sun.” In the final sentence, she equivocates again: “I don’t know, and so I can’t be sure. It is only something I remember.” She can’t be sure: do horses have memory and feelings and a sense of their lives as humans do?

She lived and wrote before Temple Grandin translated how animals think, act, and feel. She also lived in an era where she was referred to as an aviatrix, and as an authoress—as if that feminine suffix came with a warning—reader beware, this is likely to be full of reckless emotionality. Perhaps what she wasn’t sure about was the reception of her ideas and the authority of her words.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue