Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2004

Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell. Adrienne E. Gavin. Sutton Publishing. [pounds sterling]20.00. xi 276 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2838-7. Succeeding generations of English-speaking children have been entranced by Black Beauty, Anna Sewell's 'autobiography' of a horse. By 1995 it is estimated to have sold over 40,000,000 copies.

Though intended for children it was also a protest against animal cruelty, a novel of Victorian life and a practical guide to looking after horses. The difficulty for any biographer is that the subject, born into a Norfolk Quaker family, 'lived quietly and without fanfare', and was overshadowed by her mother, the poet, Mary Sewell. From her teenage years she suffered ill health due to lameness caused by a severely sprained ankle and other causes which might be diagnosed as Lupus. Like her mother, she left the Quakers but kept a strong religious sense and a devotion to 'good works'. The experiences of her unadventurous life bore fruit in the 1870s when she wrote Black Beauty for which she was paid [pounds sterling]40 by Jarrold & Sons. On its publication in 1877, it became an immediate success. She died the next year. By the mid-1880s it would reach its thirty-fifth edition. This is an affectionate and well written biography that is based on a great deal of scholarly work and does much to restore a lost author to life. (T.B.)