PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Anna Sewell was born in 1820 into a Quaker family whose respect for horses was out of step with the common view of the time. Disabled in a fall at the age of 14, Anna lived all her life with her parents but became an expert carriage driver and, as editor and stern critic, helped her mother Mary Wright Sewell become a successful author of evangelical children's books. Anna wrote Black Beauty, her only book, in the last years of her life as a plea for more humane treatment of horses. She died in 1878, a year after the novel was published to wide acclaim.
Laced with generous doses of moral virtue . . . Black Beauty has more integrity and decency than the average human -- Justine Hankins, the <i>Guardian</i> Sewell's novel should be regarded as a work of protest literature, the forerunner less of Lassie or the novels of Christine Pullein-Thompson than of today's animal rights activism and anti-hunting lobby * Telegraph * With vivid detail and simple, yet lyrical, prose, Black Beauty describes both the cruelty and kindness that an ebony-coloured horse experiences through his lifetime * NPR *
