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Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell. Adrienne E. Gavin. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2004.
"The great are often written about but not always the good," writes Adrienne Gavin in her Preface to Dark Horse. Indeed, the greatest challenge presented to the biographer of Anna Sewell is making a compelling narrative of Sewell's steadfast Victorian probity, innocent of anything later readers might consider interesting-a double life, love affairs, vice. Yet such a writer produced what is undoubtedly a great classic: Black Beauty (1877). Black Beauty "was once the sixth highest selling book in the world and ...has outsold the collective works of Dickens" (Gavin v). So powerful was that work-the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse," according to the American promoter of the book-that almost everyone knows elements of the story. It has completely overshadowed its author, to the extent that Trivial Pursuit (incorrectly) claims Sewell was American and that her grave was bulldozed by a developer in 1984.
This is only the third biography of Sewell to be written since Sewell's death in 1878, five months after Black Beauty was published. Gavin has meticulously researched not only the available primary documents by and about Anna Sewell and her family, including letters that became available as recently as 1986, but has also visited every place associated with Sewell in southern England. The resulting labor of love is a monument to an unfashionable kind of goodness: quiet philanthropy and patient suffering.
Anna Sewell was a boisterous and active child. Her mother, Mary Sewell was a...