ANNA SEWELL WROTE only one book. While sick in bed, she

penned the story that would become one of the most loved

ever written--an autobiography of a gallant black horse named

Black Beauty.

Anna was born on March 20, 182o, in Great Yarmouth in the

east of England. Raised as a Quaker, she learned compassion for

animals at an early age. Anna s mother, Mary Wright Sewell, was a

successful children s writer, and Anna learned the craft of writing

by editing her mother s work.

Anna suffered a bone disease, and a fall at age fourteen left her

crippled. She walked with a crutch, but could ride and drive well,

often controlling horses by her voice alone. When the family could

afford to keep a horse, Anna would drive her father, a bank man-

ager, to work every day.

Her health, never strong after her injury, failed, and for the last

ten years of her life Sewell was bedridden.When faced with a poor

prognosis of survival, she began writing a story that she hoped

would change the way people treated their horses. The story

became Black Beauty, The Autobiography of a Horse, published in ~877, a

groundbreaking novel told from the point of view of a horse.

Anna Sewell died before she could see the phenomenal success

of her book. Black Beauty sold thirty million copies in the next one

hundred years (a fiction record), was the basis for multiple motion

pictures, and inspired a popular series of children s books about

horses through history. Sewell probably would have valued the

book s success at reform more highly, however. Brick Beauty made