Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (review)

At the ending of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, she speaks of a long domestic life on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi: "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within" (104). I thought of that line while reading the life of Anna Sewell (1820–1878), another sheltered writer with a daring life.

For a classic as celebrated as the great equine autobiography, Black Beauty, the author is no Louisa May Alcott. The name of Anna Sewell rarely appears in the pantheon of Victorian classic authors; few scholars closely pursue her work. Being a one-book author, whose world-famous bestseller came at the very end of her life, Sewell is obscured by her work, which has a life of its own far surpassing the author's fifty-eight years. Indeed, the work still flourishes over a century and a quarter later. Literary critics tend to disparage bestsellers as lesser temporal works, while cultural critics ask different kind of questions. As Jane Tompkins asks, what is it that makes certain texts be "sensational designs" that perform "cultural work"?

This then is the challenge for a biographer of Anna Sewell: how to dramatize a sheltered life with daring within? How to make a largely invisible author be present and persuasive to the common reader? While Sewell's one book sold approximately as many copies as the oeuvre of Charles Dickens, we know relatively little about its creator. Only a few scholars have ventured far into this uncertain landscape. Margaret Baker's children's biography, Anna Sewell and Black Beauty (1956), was followed by Susan Chitty's The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty (1971), which considerably closed the gap in public knowledge of this relatively unknown writer of a classic work. Chitty rightly acknowledges the influence of Mary Sewell, Anna's mother, for her freethinking spirituality, her Quaker philanthropy, and her instincts as a writer. Instead of Anna's animal rights protest novel being an anomaly, her book naturally evolved from the sensibilities she inherited and honed. Along the way others have attacked the text's moral tone and found it to be more propaganda than prose.

Since Chitty's book appeared over thirty years ago, Peter Hollindale's introduction to the Oxford World's Classic edition of Black Beauty (1992) stands out in its respect for a critically neglected work. He moves textual criticism of this best-loved book from an ahistorical antididacticism toward a contextual, rhetorical narrative. The author was much more than a do-gooder; she was a vivid storyteller, who spoke in the diction and voice appealing to drivers, grooms, and stablemen, her intended audience. That children resonated with her message suggests compatible subject matter and style. That the text is moral and sentimental makes it powerful. Hollindale reminds us, as Mitzi Myers did so brilliantly in her life's work, that didactic texts need not be read didactically. I also thought of Mitzi Myers when reading in the Chitty book how Sewell was influenced by Maria Edgeworth's works, an intertextuality that the new biography slights. Indeed, Gavin curiously ignores the historical precedent of animal autobiographies, such as George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871), or, earlier still, Dorothy Kilner's The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse (1783).

What Adrienne Gavin's Dark Horse does offer is a sympathetic and stirring portrayal of Anna Sewell that is deeply moving. Gavin presents the Quaker author as a wounded healer, a woman who suffered from a debilitating condition not recognized at the time: lupus, an autoimmune disease whose symptoms resemble those that mysteriously crippled Anna over a lifetime. Other writers have imparted a certain neurosis, if not hypochondria, to her suffering, which distorts her accomplishments. Gavin's physician sister suggested a different medical diagnosis that helps to redeem her mental health and to explain her persistent efforts to find a cure. Gavin's new interpretation might be enhanced with further work...