"'Let me try, then' said Lucy."

This illustration conveys female athletic ambition and determination through its title, “‘Let me try, then’ said Lucy,” and in the rendering of Lucy’s body as she deftly rides over a ravine thick with brambles. The men who look on, not yet having made it across the obstacle, appear both aghast and affronted by her athletic ability. Lucy is stably planted on her horse, a sign of her skill as a rider. She leans forward so that the trajectory of her body leaves us with the impression that she is about to burst through the left side of the illustration, as though she cannot be contained by the boundaries of the image. The skirt of her riding habit, which looks to be caught on one of the brambles, is pulled taught, giving the viewer a clear outline of her strong, muscular thighs.

In the athletically-powerful body, conventional ornamentality collides with physical prowess. For many social commentators, it was dangerously empowering for women to hone their bodies through sports. At the same time, however, athleticism produces the disciplined body of feminine ideology. Here, we see the corseted, restrained female form that is iconic of the mid-Victorian period. Horseback riding is particularly revealing in this context because it afforded women physical agency, yet they rode wearing corsets and sitting side-saddle in compliance with concerns about the ‘threat’ that the traditional male riding position posed to women’s virginity and virtue.

Illustrated in 1865 for the novel Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds, this image of Lucy corresponds to descriptions of the huntswoman Alicia Audley from the 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (discussed in chapter two of my dissertation). On horseback, Alicia “goes through the world as she goes across country—straight ahead, and over everything,” displaying, like Lucy in this image, self-assertive energy and a boundless sporting impulse. As a genre, sensation fiction aimed to disrupt stable notions of gender and identity primarily through the unruly behavior of its heroines. In 1862, critic E.S. Dallas identified the erring sensation heroine with “passion, purpose, and movement”—qualities that are likewise conveyed by Lucy’s body in this visual construction of the horseback-riding Sportswoman.