The story describes a young middle-class Englishwoman who "had no luck." Though outwardly successful, she is haunted by a sense of failure; her husband is a ne'er-do-well and her work as a commercial artist doesn't earn as much as she'd like. The family's lifestyle exceeds its income and unspoken anxiety about money permeates the household. Her children, a son Paul and his two sisters, sense this anxiety, and Paul even claims he can hear the house "whispering": "There must be more money".

Paul tells his Uncle Oscar Cresswell about betting on horse races with Bassett, the gardener. He's been placing bets using his pocket money and has won and saved three hundred twenty pounds. Sometimes he says he is "sure" of a winner for an upcoming race, and the horses he names do in fact win, sometimes at remarkable odds. Uncle Oscar and Bassett both place large bets on the horses Paul names.

After further winning, Paul and Oscar arrange to give the mother a gift of five thousand pounds, but the gift only lets her spend more. Disappointed, Paul tries harder than ever to be "lucky". As the Derby approaches, Paul is determined to learn the winner. Concerned about his health, his mother rushes home from a party and discovers his secret. He has been spending hours riding his rocking horse, sometimes all night long, until he "gets there", into a clairvoyant state where he can be sure of the winner's name.

Paul remains ill through the day of the Derby. Informed by Cresswell, Bassett has placed Paul's bet on Malabar, at fourteen to one and won 80,000 pounds. But the boy dies in the night because of tire and excessive mental strains.

D.H.Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner, a moving short story which deals with greed and the dangers of outright materialism. What D.H. Lawrence did so well in this short story was how he fully depicts the potent yet unverbalized influences on the psyche of the boy, as well as the subsequent changes in his feeling and behavior. The Rocking-Horse Winner is truly a tragic tale about a boy whose golden heart and gift for clairvoyance ultimately led to his demise, because of excessive, counter-productive greed and confusion besetting his mother, who adhered to a misunderstanding of the application of motivational greed, as opposed to an unbalanced obsession. Love and luck were equated according to the amount of money in the coffers. By a series of prognostications, the boy did bring the precious cash forth, all the while rocking violently on his magical rocking horse, which was actually a tool of mediation and focus for him to assuage the winning horse in the day's race. He was eventually driven insane by the a-dolt's pre-occupation until his demise. Ironically, in one scene, his mother admonished him to cast away his childish ways, when she herself did not realize her own compulsion.

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885— 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.

"No other writer with his imaginative standing has in our time written books that are so open to life." —Alfred Kazin

“Lawrence had that quality of genius which sucks out of ordinary experience essences strange or unknown to men.” —Anaïs Nin