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Pony Books
Alison Haymonds
The pony book continues in the long tradition of literature celebrating the love affair
between the British and the horse, yet it has always been relegated firmly to the
sidelines. Like all popular fiction with mass appeal, the quality of the stories is variable,
but there are pony books which merit comparison with any books in the canon of
children’s literature.
The genre, which first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, and then developed and
flourished during the post-war boom in riding, is part of a much wider range of horse
stories, which can be divided into four categories:
1 The anthropomorphic horse story in which the horse replaces the human hero and
tells the story or is the centre of consciousness. The most famous examples are
Black Beauty and Moorland Mousie. This type of story has almost died out, but can
still be found in the Australian writer Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby series (from
1958).
2 The wild horse story, mainly American, which owes much to the influence of Western
movies and generally features a boy taming a horse. It has many examples,
including Will James’s Smoky (1926), My Friend Flicka (1943) and the long-running
Black Stallion series (from 1941), and is still popular in the USA.
3 The adventure story which includes ponies—Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull,
Mary Treadgold, Monica Edwards and Monica Dickens are key names in this
category.
4 The pony story which is realistic, domestic, and based in Britain; the humans are of
equal importance to the horses, and the relationship between girl (or occasionally
boy) and pony is the driving force of the book. Joanna Cannan, Primrose Cumming,
the Pullein-Thompsons, K.M.Peyton and Patricia Leitch are among the major writers.This final category is the one commonly perceived to be ‘the pony story’. As a genre, it
lacks the universality of school stories or family stories. It ignores the world outside the
stable yard, and most of the traditional conventions of storytelling—love and villainy,
conflict and mystery. Its readership is as limited as its scope, mainly female, adolescent,
and pony mad, for the passion for ponies and pony books seems to be a uniquely female
phenomenon. In the formula pony book, the girl is the central character with the pony
filling an ambiguous role, which is closer to the traditional heroine both as victim and
object of desire. Ponies are not completely personified but they are treated as three-