Written by Anna Sewell in the last years of her life in 1877, this was her only novel but is one of the best selling children's books of all time.The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir of a horse named Black Beauty, starting with his days as a colt on an English farm, to his hard life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the countryside.

Throughout his life he suffers many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness.

Every chapter is a story of an incident in Black Beauty's life usually containing a lesson or moral.