Black Beauty

About

Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) — narrated in the first person by a horse — is the only novel Sewell wrote, dictated to her mother in the last years of her life. It was conceived explicitly as a work of animal welfare advocacy, and it succeeded: it transformed public attitudes toward horses and was directly influential in improving conditions for working horses in Victorian England. As group reading, Black Beauty's voice gives a sustained single narrator; the human characters who own and mistreat or care for him give natural secondary roles.