For several years of my childhood, I attended weekly riding lessons at Huntington Meadow Stables outside Rochester, New York, where I grew up. I advanced slowly from beginner to intermediate level classes in English-style jumping, occasionally participating in shows in which I almost invariably placed last; I had a string of pretty, pale 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-place ribbons hanging in my bedroom. For one week during the summer, I went to day camp at the stables, where we trained more intensively and learned to care for the horses, mucking stalls, braiding their manes, rubbing the dirt out of their coats with curry combs. I was, it turned out, not only an untalented rider but also viciously allergic to horses. My parents would load me with antihistamines, but by the end of each day my eyes were swollen shut and I could barely breathe. I loved horses so much.
How does a girl from the striving middle class—unathletic, bookish, growing up in a suburban townhouse—learn...
Eugenia Zuroski is a professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University. She is editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction and author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) as well as several articles on British literature and material culture from 1660 to 1820.
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