Disabled and unable to walk, she began learning about horses, spending many hours driving her father to and from the station from which he commuted to work.

[6] Sewell died of hepatitis or tuberculosis on 25 April 1878, only five months after the novel was published, but she lived long enough to see its initial success.

[4] She was buried on 30 April 1878 in the Quaker burial-ground at Lammas near Buxton, Norfolk, where a wall plaque marks her resting place.

The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country.

[1] The book describes conditions among London horse-drawn cab drivers, including the financial hardship caused to them by high licence fees and low, legally fixed fares.

[9] Originally meant to be informative literature read by adults on the norms of horse cruelty and preventions of these unjust acts, Black Beauty is now seen as a children's book.

Coslett emphasizes that, while Black Beauty is not the first book written in the style of an animal autobiography, it is a novel that "allows the reader to slide in and out of horse-consciousness, blurring the human/animal divide".

[14][clarification needed] Published in 1877, in the last years of Anna Sewell's life, Black Beauty sold over 50 million copies worldwide in 50 different languages.

[18] However, Claire Datnow, in her memoir Behind the Walled Garden of Apartheid: Growing up White in Segregated South Africa,[19] writes that this "fact" was a standing 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."

[20] In addition, animal rights activists would habitually distribute copies of the novel to horse drivers and to people in stables.

[21] The depiction of the "bearing rein" in Black Beauty spurred so much outrage and empathy from readers that its use was not only abolished in Victorian England, but public interest in anti-cruelty legislation in the United States also grew significantly.

The arguably detrimental social practices concerning the use of horses in Black Beauty inspired the development of legislation in various states that would condemn such abusive behaviours towards animals.