St Mawr

The heroine of the story, Lou Witt, abandons her sterile marriage and a brittle, cynical post-First World War England.

Her sense of alienation is associated with her encounter with a high-spirited stallion, the eponymous St Mawr.

She eventually settles in a remote ranch set high in the mountains of New Mexico, near Taos.

The inspiration for the novel came from Lawrence seeing a magnificent bay stallion while staying during January 1924 in the village of Pontesbury, Shropshire, while visiting a writing friend Frederick Carter.

[1] Lawrence wrote most of this brief novel whilst spending five months of the summer of 1924 at what is now known as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, a property which he and wife, Frieda, acquired from Mabel Dodge Luhan earlier that year.