The setting for "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is physically stark--the rural landscape of fin-de-siècle England at a particularly cold and clammy time of year and in circumstances that are far from ideal. Yet in that environment, the action of the story shows that a good life can be found by rejecting the calculated approach to relationships and by living according to instinctual responses. Mabel and Jack symbolize the passivity of conscious experience and the dominance of the emotional and instinctual approach to life. Mabel's brother Joe symbolizes the conscious, intellectual (not necessarily intelligent) approach.
Lawrence draws a picture of a slightly dysfunctional, hardly communicative, and emotionally disconnected family in the surviving adult Pervin children. The focus is on 27-year-old Mabel, who seems to be a combination of an object of scrutiny and an object of rather offhand contempt on the part of her brothers. They want to know what she is going to do, now that their family farm has been sold to pay the debts of their recently deceased--and financially improvident--father. She, the narrator explains, "did not share the same life as her brothers," yet it is they who have "a strange air of ineffectuality" (Lawrence 1).
The trouble is, the ineffectual three brothers--eldest age 35--have many more options than Mabel, whose sister died years ago. Joe, the eldest, has managed to get himself engaged to the daughter of an estate manager and will get a job, though he resents matrimony. Fred, who appears to have joined the military, suggests she take up residence with her friend Lucy and is upset when she does not agree. Malcolm, who also plans to leave, although they are unclear, suggests she study nursing.
What is not said is significant: None of the brothers offers to help Mabel situate herself after leaving the farm. Mabel is singularly unresponsive, since "they had talked at her and round her for so many years" (2), w...