Anna Sewell

Anna Sewell (1820–1878) was an English writer from a Quaker family in Norfolk. An injury to her ankles at fourteen left her lame for life, and she came to depend on horse-drawn carriages and on the horses themselves, whose treatment she observed closely. She wrote only one book, Black Beauty, composed over several years while she was an invalid and dictated in part to her mother, Mary Sewell, herself a popular author of moral verse. It was published in 1877 and she died five months later, at fifty-eight, having seen its first success but not the millions of copies and the changes in the treatment of horses that followed.