Anna Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, to a Quaker family. At fourteen she fell and badly hurt both ankles, and she was lame for the rest of her life. She got about in a pony carriage, which she drove herself, and came to know horses well.

In her fifties, too ill to leave the house, she wrote Black Beauty, dictating much of it to her mother, a writer of children's books. She wanted to make people kinder to horses. The book came out in November 1877, and she died five months later, having lived just long enough to see it succeed.