Anna Sewell spoke to me from the grave

She wants revenge…

I read Black Beauty as a child and saw only a black horse having an adventure

I read Black Beauty as a fifty-something woman and saw humankind displaying acts of coercion and cruelty that had me flinching as I raced through the pages, certain there was a happy ending to be had if my memory had served me well. Fortunately, it had.

I read it, ignoring the gazebo’s month-long impression of a contortionist. Eventually I had to take the pieces to the recycling centre

But what I knew for certain as I closed the old hardback bought from eBay was the author had wanted to say something important.

Having become an author myself, albeit of only one novel so far, the recent years I’ve spent studying form and craft have left me able to see how others ensure an underlying theme that all great novels contain.

Anna, while remaining single all her life, and dying of hepatitis in her fifties, had evidently witnessed some atrocious behaviour towards animals, specifically horses and most notably the use of a piece of leather called a bearing rein.

The rein runs from the headpiece to the harness and the tighter the fit, the higher the horse is forced to carry his head

Anna’s creation - Black Beauty - has a kind soul, a generous nature and a desire to please. From my research to date, learning about Anna and her family, it’s almost as if she put herself on the page. Perhaps she was telling her own story through metaphor.

For a woman in the 1870s to be writing at all was something. For one who was bedridden with ill-health and had to dictate it to her mother was really something else. How sad, then, that she died a few months after publication and never lived to see the huge success it would become, nor the film adaptations or the television series in the 1970s with its iconic theme tune.

https://youtu.be/8u5NgC4lZ8s?si=PEpBKXUDhk6w32ZU

(Actually it’s probably good she didn’t live til the 1970s, or she’d have been one hundred and fifty)

Animal cruelty, over the last hundred years or more, has been brought to our attention through news reports, social media, and the efforts of a great many good-hearted people. But in the days Anna was writing her tale, anyone with a penchant for controlling behaviour towards animals - or fellow humans come to that - was very much left unchecked.

As I parked near Anna’s final home in Old Catton, Norfolk a couple of weeks ago, my recent idea to write a novel inspired by her own gathered pace. I’ve begun to plot and plan and do that percolating thing which tends to accompany a new idea. (Those we mustn’t dive headfirst into while wrangling a present manuscript 🙈)

Anna never married, nor had children. She died in the late 1870s. So I am free to write creatively about her life, as long as I don’t plan to harm her reputation. I think she probably endured enough hardship while alive, what with injuring her ankles as a teenager and never able to walk properly thereafter. She could, however, drive a horse and cart and did so until she became bedridden, which was most of the last seven years of her life.

My plan is to give her another possible ending; a story in which she will have more to say and an affect on those who did her wrong. She will have the support of a four-legged friend, but it will not be a story for children. It will be for the likes of me; someone who met Black Beauty as a child and never forgot how he was treated. Watch this space… ✍🏼

Love

Kate

xx

PS can you make sure I don’t disregard my present manuscript though. These shiny new ideas are all well and good…