The Bride's Farewell, By Meg Rosoff

Chinese prospective brides of old would sometimes choose to drown themselves rather than suffer domestic slavery. But Pell Ridley, the Victorian heroine of Meg Rosoff's latest novel, decides instead to escape on horseback from her village in the New Forest the night before her nuptials, accompanied by her mute, adolescent half- brother Bean.

Initially, she is able to put her instinctive, almost magical understanding of horses to good use at country fairs, before being swindled of what little she has left. After this, the story turns more Thomas Hardy than Daphne du Maurier, with Pell forced to live in squalor and often starving. Things are even worse for Bean, incarcerated in a workhouse which is little more than a killing-field for unwanted children.

So far, so bad, but Rosoff finally turns the tables, with Pell finding succour first with a friendly gypsy family and then a brooding upper-class poacher. Things meander to an almost optimistic conclusion, with Pell no longer in the spirit of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, but more of Isabella Bird, the 19th-century explorer, a remarkable woman, who insisted, despite being both ill and over-protected by her family, on riding a horse through the Canadian Rockies in a blizzard, before falling in love with a notorious outlaw.

Fifty years ago Barbara Leonie Picard wrote a fine novel, Ransom for a Knight, within which Alys, another spirited teenage heroine, also rides away in the small hours of the morning, this time aiming for the wilds of medieval Scotland. She, too, suffers from fleas, illness and lack of food and shelter, but there is not the sexual threat that hovers around Pell. Both novels are in a sense love stories for the noble, long-suffering horses that treat their young mistresses so gently and are in turn given every care and comfort. The horses never seem to mind, and the day when a historical novel aimed at adolescent-plus readers features a truly horrible steed has clearly yet to come – if indeed it ever does.