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Perhaps surprisingly, Disney have never adapted the novel. As she died young, Anna Sewell (1820-1878) was actually survived by her mother, by six years.ĥ. Rather, she wished to highlight the plight of animals and the way horses were treated in Victorian England, but did not single out children as her readership. Among her biggest-selling works was Mother’s Last Words, ‘ a story of two boys kept from evil courses by their mother’s last words‘, which sold over a million copies. However, her daughter’s attitude to her one novel was quite different: Anna Sewell did not write Black Beauty specifically for children. Mary Wright Sewell (1797-1884) wrote a number of juvenile bestsellers, and was a successful poet as well as an author of children’s fiction. Anna Sewell’s mother was also a successful author. Numerous other histories of South Africa also repeat this fact – but is it a fact or a myth? Claire Datnow, in her memoir Behind the Walled Garden of Apartheid: Growing up White in Segregated South Africa, writes that this fact was a ‘reigning joke’ among her circle of friends, invented to make fun of the ‘ignorance of the censors’ – the idea being that Black Beauty had been banned ‘because the censors thought it referred to a black woman.’ So it appears as though it may be a myth (though we’d welcome further evidence on this).Ĥ. Robert Ross, in his A Concise History of South Africa, states that Black Beauty was banned. The story goes that the South African government disliked the book’s title because it placed the words ‘black’ and ‘beauty’ side by side. There appears to be some debate about whether this is true, however. There is a story that the book was banned in South Africa during the Apartheid era. This makes it the ancestor of – and a possible influence on – some notable later animal-narrated stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Maltese Cat’ (1895), which centres on a polo match told from the perspective of the ponies.ģ. Sewell’s unusual conceit was to tell the story from the perspective of the horse rather than have a human or impersonal ‘omniscient’ narrator. Black Beauty is described on its title-page as ‘translated from the equine’.