Anna Sewell Audiobooks

Anna Sewell, born in Norfolk in 1820, was an English novelist remembered for a single book – but what a book. Raised in a Quaker family and moved to London as a baby, she grew up around writing: her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, was a popular author of children’s books, and Anna later edited her mother’s work as well as joining her in charitable causes.

Her own life was quiet and often hard. She never married, lived with her parents in Sussex, Gloucestershire and Norfolk, and a chronic illness confined her to the life of an invalid, punctuated by trips to spa resorts in England and on the Continent. It was in these final years, between 1871 and 1877, that she wrote Black Beauty, her novel about a horse. She lived just long enough to see it published, dying a few months afterwards in 1878.

As an audiobook, Black Beauty earns its place on any family listening list. It is that rare thing: a Victorian novel that children genuinely follow and adults quietly admire, a story about a horse written with the patience of a lifetime’s observation. The knowledge that Sewell composed it through years of illness, and lived only months beyond its publication, gives the listening an added poignancy.

It was her only book, which makes the choice refreshingly simple: this is the whole of Anna Sewell, and it has proved enough to keep her name alive for well over a century.