Enid Bagnold

The timeless tale of 14-year-old Velvet Brown's participation in the Grand National Steeplechase has thrilled generations of readers. The story provides a positive role model for girls and remains ever popular with young horse lovers.

National Velvet

Bagnold, Enid.

National velvet

Sarah Sammis

National Velvet is another one of those books I've been meaning to read. As a child I enjoyed the 1944 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney. When I was reading books for the BookCrossing Literacy Train, I made sure to add this one of the pile to get some classics into the mass release.

Velvet Brown, the protagonist, finds herself the sudden owner of a group of horses through a series of unusual events. Of all the horses she falls in love with the most ornery, a piebald nicknamed "The Pie." With her new horse Velvet decides to out do her famous mother (who had swum the English channel in her youth).

With her mother's earnings and help from the son of her mother's trainer, Velvet sets out to do the impossible: win the Grand National. There are two problems: she's too young and the wrong gender.

When the National Velvet plot moves onto the Nationals and the fallout from Velvet entering, I was reminded of Babe: The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith. The Sheep Trials which Babe wins are a wonderful parody of the melodrama that is the fall out from Velvet's participation in the Grand National.

Janice Hopper

Like many girls in the last century, I went through a "horsey" phase. (Do girls still do that? I suspect not, but since my acquaintance with modern girls is small, I don't know.) I read all the horsey books I could find in our small local library. Billy and Bangs, Misty of Chincoteague, Brighty of Grand Canyon, Man O' War, etc. (I also read dog books, but I still read those.)

I remember reading National Velvet either in late middle school or early high school. It was one of the books in the bookshelf just outside the door of the Kids Room. That's where the Andre Norton books were too, the stuff that was just a tiny bit more advanced than the kid books.

National Velvet was where I learned the world "piebald." I couldn't quite visualize it, but I had a good idea what it meant.

Anyway, National Velvet was on TCM last night. I watched it for the first time in donkey's years, and was smitten by the desire to read the book again. It's available inexpensively on Kindle, so off I went and read it overnight.

I found I liked the writing style of this story VERY MUCH. It's a dated style, and family life and treatment of animals are very different from now. The girls (Velvet and her sisters) go off and ride horses without supervision. The dog has the run of the bitches of the village. Part of the father's slaughterhouse is apparently just on the other side of one of the walls of the house.

In the midst of all this, Velvet has become enamored of a horse (The Pie) who keeps escaping his enclosure by leaping fences and running through the village. She wins him for a shilling in a village raffle, and somewhere along the way, decides she could bring him into the history books by riding in the National Steeplechase race. The rest of the book is how she gets there, and what happens after. 

It's really an extraordinary book. Velvet isn't a supergirl. She has a nervous stomach and vomits easily. She's skinny and has buck teeth. She gets tired and nervous. Mi (short for Michael) Taylor, her partner in the race prep, is her father's employee. He is NOT a love interest, anywhere along the line. He's a facilitator, helping Velvet with the knowledge he gained working at various racecourses over the years. He's also the son of the man who coached Violet's mother, Araminty, when she swam the English Channel when she was 19. 

So Velvet wins the race, then faints and falls off The Pie, which leads to the discovery that she is, in fact, a girl. The National Hunt committee men meet to decide what's to be done - whether to prosecute someone for attempts to "defraud". That led to this little exchange between a couple of the men:

"If my daughter'd done it," said Lord Henry Vile, "I'd be..." He paused and stroked his lip with his finger.
"Pretty upset, I should think..."
"I wasn't going to say that," said Lord Henry. "No." 

The men in this story either HELP (Mi Taylor) or don't hinder (pretty much the rest of them) Velvet. Her mother is Velvet's rock. The other family members have their quirks and foibles (and how WEIRD is Donald the one boy in the crew???), and the shape of the family is very different to what we're used to now. But it's a good family, and they're good together.

Now I want to read more Enid Bagnold. :)

Rowan Myers

In mid-twentieth-century England, fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown, determined to turn the unruly horse she wins in a raffle into a champion, learns that she needs more than hard work and dedication to achieve her goal of riding her horse in the Grand National steeplechase.

National Velvet

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