First, I want to thank Kristin Czarnecki for asking me if I knew of any horse references in Virginia Woolf. My casual reply, that I had noticed a repeated phrase about Woolf's “taking her fences,” led to my being here right now!

I must also thank Mark Hussey without whose CD–ROM I could never have put this “narrative” together. But many times I wanted to curse! Do you realize how many references to horses there are in Virginia Woolf's work? All sorts of horses—cart horses, dray horses, race horses, plough horses, runaway horses, dead horses. Who knew? Like Elisa Sparks with her flowers, I was overwhelmed by what I found. By the time I skimmed through all the hits for “horse” in the letters and diaries and the novels, I had fourteen handwritten pages of lists, one reference per line. I then looked up and typed those I thought were most representative or interesting, which gave me a pool of 35 double–spaced pages of quotations. Please realize, too, that although it occurred to me to search for other words, like “steed” and “gallop,” and “pony,” I stopped with “taking fences” and “horse”! I also never got to the essays, which means I will not be using the passage about the thoroughbred from “Middlebrow.”

From my original pool of quotations, I have cobbled together (another Woolfian phrase) a reading, not an analysis. I have had to leave out a lot of other good passages. But here, in 52 passages, in her own words, is the Virginia Woolf who might, after all, be at home in the horse capital of the world. I will not interrupt her words with comments or context, but I have occasionally inserted a name in place of a pronoun and I have often cut out bits to save time. Except for the prologue and the epilogue, the passages follow a rough chronological order. The source for each passage follows it.

PROLOGUE

And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice.