Macmillan Collector’s Library: Black Beauty

Anna Sewell was born in 1820 into a Quaker family whose respect for horses was out of step with the common view of the time. Disabled in a fall at the age of 14, Anna lived all her life with her parents but became an expert carriage driver and, as editor and stern critic, helped her mother Mary Wright Sewell become a successful author of evangelical children’s books. Anna wrote Black Beauty, her only book, in the last years of her life as a plea for more humane treatment of horses. She died in 1878, a year after the novel was published to wide acclaim.