Anna Sewell

Anna Sewell (1820–1878) was an English writer who published one book. An ankle injury at fourteen left her unable to walk far for the rest of her life, so she depended on horses to get anywhere, and she wrote Black Beauty from a sofa in her last years in failing health, dictating to her mother when she could no longer hold a pen. She meant it for the men who worked with horses rather than for children — to teach, as she put it, kindness and sympathy towards them — and it is credited with helping to end the fashion for the bearing rein. She died five months after it was published, in time to see it begin to sell.