Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse

ANNA SEWELL (1820-1878) was an English novelist. She wrote only one book, «Black Beauty » (1877), a story for children relating the life of a black horse, which suffers much but eventually finds a happy home. The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a colt on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Sewell originally wrote it for those who worked with horses. She said, "a special aim [was] to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses " The book, for which she received £20, was published three months before her death; its immediate success and fame survived for many generations, and it became established as a children´s classic.