Anna Sewell
1 book analyzed
Biography
Anna Sewell (1820-1878) was born into a Quaker family in Norfolk, England. At fourteen she slipped on a wet pavement and permanently damaged both ankles; she could never walk properly for the rest of her life and was often entirely housebound. This made her entirely dependent on horses for transportation — she was driven everywhere by horse-drawn carriage. That dependence gave her a perspective on horses — as collaborators rather than servants — that was unusual in her era. She began writing Black Beauty in 1871 when she was ill and could no longer dictate to her mother; she wrote lying down on her sofa over six years, with a pencil, revising heavily. She died in April 1878, four months after the novel's publication in November 1877, never knowing it would become the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.