Black Beauty
A horse narrates his own life, from a pleasant farm to hard work in London, and the novel follows the people who own and employ him. Sewell wrote it as a protest against the bearing rein and other forms of cruelty, and it was her only book.
The animal narration is simple and effective, and the book's anger is directed at specific practices rather than at villains. Some episodes are preachy, and modern readers will notice the class assumptions. What remains is a very readable account of how animals were treated in the nineteenth century, written by someone who had spent her life around horses.
Public-domain status
First published in 1877. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Anna Sewell died in 1878, so this work has been free to republish there since 1949.
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Keep reading
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- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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