Novella: St. Mawr

Overview
D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr centers on a young Englishwoman whose encounter with a fierce, magnificent stallion becomes the catalyst for rejecting a lifeless postwar society and seeking a more authentic existence. The novella follows Lou as she struggles with the thinness of modern relationships, the stifling polish of upper-class England, and the failure of art and intellect to satisfy a deeper hunger. The horse, St. Mawr, is less a pet than a living force whose beauty and danger disclose the falsity around her and draw her toward the wild landscapes of the American Southwest.

Plot
Lou meets St. Mawr in a scene of spectacle and sport, where the horse’s blazing presence immediately sets him apart from the sleek, showy animals around him. Recognizing in him a vitality that the people she knows conspicuously lack, she purchases the stallion and hires a taciturn Welsh groom who respects the animal’s untamed spirit. Lou’s marriage to Rico, a beautiful, refined man who seems curiously drained of will, quickly sours. The nearer she draws to the horse’s dark, concentrated life, the more tedious and hollow her social circle appears. St. Mawr is difficult and dangerous, injuring riders, resisting control, and his intractability mirrors Lou’s own refusal to be managed.

Tension thickens as the horse exposes buried truths about human relations: Rico’s charm masks a sterility of feeling; clever friends are spiritually tired; flirtations cool at the sight of real power. In a series of charged episodes around the stables and country house, St. Mawr becomes an uncompromising standard by which Lou measures everything and finds it wanting. When her marriage collapses, she turns away from England altogether, leaving with her sharp-tongued, worldly mother for New Mexico.

New Mexico
In the high, sunbitten country around a remote ranch, the air feels different: thinner, harsher, yet somehow cleansing. The land is austere, edged with mountains and piñon, its light stripping away genteel pretense. Lou boards with an American ranchwoman and meets people whose lives are shaped by weather, work, and the very real dangers of the terrain. She brings St. Mawr with her, hoping the horse might find a truer home. Yet the same wildness that drew her to him proves perilous. In the blaze and thorns of the Southwest, the stallion is finally lost, felled not by human will but by the land itself.

Characters and relationships
Lou’s mother, witty and shrewd, understands the social game and its emptiness, and her irony both pricks and protects her daughter. Rico, finely made and exquisitely civilized, embodies the postwar male Lawrence saw as refined into anemia. The Welsh groom, instinctive and laconic, stands somewhere between human culture and animal life, reading St. Mawr’s moods in ways the gentry cannot. Around them swirl acquaintances and hangers-on, their clever talk paling beside the brute, radiant presence of the horse.

Themes and symbols
St. Mawr is the novella’s burning metaphor: animal vitality as a standard of truth. The horse’s dangerous splendor reveals the falsity of performances, social, marital, even artistic, and pushes Lou toward a solitude in which she might live by a fiercer measure. England’s parks and drawing rooms suggest elegant exhaustion; New Mexico’s stark distances offer ordeal and possibility. The death of the stallion does not negate his meaning; rather, it leaves Lou with a distilled, inner flame. She chooses a hard, independent life at the mountain ranch, not as renunciation but as an affirmative act, the acceptance of risk, loneliness, and the wild pulse that first called to her in the gaze of a dark, ungovernable horse.