"National Velvet" by Enid Bagnold

First published: 1935; illustrated by the author’s daughter, Laurian Jones

Type of work: Domestic realism/adventure tale

Themes: Family, coming-of-age, and animals

Time of work: The twentieth century, prior to 1931

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: South Downs of Sussex, England, by the sea

Principal Characters:

• Velvet Brown, a fourteen-year-old girl plagued by a weak stomach and braces on her teeth, but gifted with unusual courage and imagination
• Araminty Brown, her mother, a taciturn woman who has grown fat since she swam the English Channel years before but whose spirit remains unchanged
• Mi Taylor, the family’s live-in helper, who shares Velvet’s vision and trains her for the Grand National just as his father once trained Velvet’s mother to swim the English Channel
• William Brown, a village butcher, who cannot always understand his children and wife but does his best for them nevertheless
• Edwina Brown, Velvet’s beautiful oldest sister, so far the only one of the Brown girls interested in boys
• Meredith Brown, who possesses the same passion for canaries that her sister Velvet feels for horses
• Donald Brown, Velvet’s four-year-old brother, whose imaginative and persistent lying makes him often irritating but always amusing

The Story

One of the achievements of “National Velvet” is its warm, humorous, and richly detailed description of ordinary domestic life. The only extraordinary thing about the Brown family is the fact that Araminty Brown, the wife of a butcher and mother of five children, once won acclaim for swimming the English Channel. Now the Browns live quietly, absorbed in their various activities, taking for granted their peaceful existence in a small English village near the sea. Sharing their daily life is Mi Taylor, who wandered by one day to offer his services as a handyman and stayed on to help Mr. Brown in the slaughterhouse and Mrs. Brown with the youngest child, Donald, whose outrageous behavior provides much of the humor in the book.

Unlike her older sisters, described as “golden greyhounds,” Velvet Brown is not beautiful. She has wispy hair, a tendency to become sick to her stomach, and a metal plate that she must wear to straighten her teeth. Velvet, however, has a passion for horses; when she prays, she asks God to give her horses and to let her become “the best rider in England.” The Browns do own a horse, but Miss Ada is a sour, aged pony that hates to be ridden, so Velvet’s equestrian activities are limited mostly to her rides across the downs on imaginary mounts and her participation in the annual gymkhana at a nearby town.

Velvet’s prayers are answered when the village grocer raffles off The Piebald, a horse with the annoying habit of jumping out of his pasture and running wild in the streets. Many of the other villagers and all the Brown children buy tickets, but it is Velvet who wins The Pie, which she and Mi envision as a contender for the Grand National Steeplechase. By an amazing coincidence, Velvet also finds herself the new owner of five riding horses, impulsively bequeathed to her by a wealthy neighbor who sympathized with her longing for horses.

After the horse show, where Velvet manages to compete without becoming ill and The Pie shows great promise in a jumping class, Velvet and Mi take steps to further their fantastic plan to enter an inexperienced horse of questionable breeding in the Grand National. At first the only person informed of their scheme is Mrs. Brown, who provides the entry fee in the form of gold sovereigns, the prize from her swim across the Channel years before. Her support of the plan overcomes Mr. Brown’s objections, and soon the whole village knows that The Pie will run in the Grand National. Mrs. Brown alone knows that the rider will be Velvet herself, disguised as a man because women are not allowed in the race.

Velvet’s dream for her horse to be immortalized as a winner of the National comes true, for The Pie outjumps and outruns his competitors in the race. His disqualification after his jockey’s gender becomes known is what Velvet has expected; she is startled, however, by her sudden notoriety as “National Velvet.” Ambitious only for The Pie, Velvet remains unspoiled by the attention lavished on her by the press and the public, and faces her future with a new confidence.

Context

During a writing career that began when she was nine years old, Enid Bagnold produced poetry, novels, plays, children’s books, and an autobiography. Although she won critical acclaim for some of her other works, especially her novel Serena Blandish (1924) and her play The Chalk Garden (1956), her best-known work is “National Velvet,” which has received much attention. Upon publication it was featured by the Book-of-the-Month Club in both England and the United States; later it was made into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney (1944), a short-lived television series (1960), and a play (1961).

A few critics dismiss “National Velvet” as an implausible story about horses and racing, but most critics praise the author’s humor, originality, and style. The book is considered particularly skillful in its depiction of family life and its unsentimental characterization of children. For its realistic presentation of children’s thoughts and feelings, it has been compared to Richard Hughes’s The Innocent Voyage (1929) and termed by the critic Mason Wade “one of the great fictional studies in child psychology.” The authenticity of the child characters, especially Velvet and Donald, and the realism of the Browns’ domestic routine persuade the reader to suspend disbelief and accept the miraculous events that occur.

A curious blend of realism and fantasy, of calm domesticity and thrilling adventure, “National Velvet” appeals to the imagination of child and adult readers alike. Although many of the events in the book are wildly improbable, if not impossible, the characters are realistic and the story is compelling. Bagnold has presented, in this story about Velvet Brown and her piebald horse, another version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the ugly duckling who becomes a swan, and the appeal of this “eternal drama of the last being first” undoubtedly accounts in large part for the book’s continuing popularity.