Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 89

-J St. Petersburg Times, Sunday, November 7, 1971 9-F 'Black To Bio graphy rom Beauty 'I certainly haven't got that dreadful sincerity and honesty she had.7 Author Susan Chitty speaking of Anna Sewell Ife oiii; iff viously felt towards the animal, is quite anomalous- with the rather desiccated spinster of Susan Chitty's biography. "You're right. You have this stiff, repressed Victorian woman and you have 'Black and it's terribly hard to see how it came out of that woman. The only answer I have come up with is that it is a case of complete repression.

SIIK WAS so thoroughly battened under that even her nearest and dearest didn't recognize what she had in her. She was rather terrifying to children, very harsh on her little nieces if they told a lie, but she unbuttoned just slightly if she took them for a ride in her pony trap, and probably that was the only time the real Anna came through, far away down a country lane with just a gig full of children." The most exciting moment in Susan Chitty's research came when she discovered a letter Anna Sewell wrote home to her mother from a country holiday, before this dreadful repression took root. "It was so human. Written before the shutter came down, before this awful 'thing' happened to her. The letter remains as a monument to what she was like; a lively, almost disrespectful, cheeky letter.

At least I felt I knew what she was like at 16." It took her a year to research the book, made harder by the fact that she couldn't bring herself to like Anna Sewell. "1 wouldn't like to meet her. 1 felt she would despise me and look down on me. She had such high morals. 1 certainly haven't got that dreadful sincerity and honesty she had.

I sort of chat away and say things for the sake of amusing people as opposed to educating them. I'm lazy and sloppy and greedy I drink, and apart from a love of horses, I don't have a single thing in common with her. I'd far prefer the mother. "She had high morals but not this awful frigid repression. She would have liked me.

She'd have tried to convert me and make something of me. Anna would just have sat there freezing in a corner, looking disapproving. I couldn't feel sympathy for her but I admired her for the ability to bear continuous pain she showed during the last long illness. Her face showed no suffering except when she was asleep and had no control over it. When her mother asked her if she ever felt like crying she said 'Sometimes when I'm alone I do say "Poor Nannie." That was very touching.

Otherwise no. I can't say I ever felt close to her except at Che two extreme ends of her life. Interested and fascinated but not sympathetic or close." 0 Times Art By Vaughn Hughes By CATHERINE STOTT ham Di ManctimUr Guardian Although "Black Beauty" has sold 40-million copies, which is supposed to make it the sixth best seller in the English language, not many people know anything about the author beyond the fact that her name was Anna Sewell. Susan Chitty has.just written a biography, "The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty." It is the story of how a mother-ridden, crippled spinster who had done nothing worthy of note throughout her. life, suddenly came to write this book in.

her mid-50s, a book she sold outright for about $50 and one that must have made fortunes for the many world-wide poachers who disregarded copyrights. LADY CHITTY, the wife of Thomas Chitty, better known as the novelist Thomas Hinde, has felt passionately about "Black Beauty" all her life. She read it twice a year as a girl to produce "a lovely cathartic cry at the fate of poor Ginger." Years later a short biographical note on Anna Sewell she found in an early edition set her speculating on the unlikelihood of the author having written such a book. "I had previously imagined her to be a great strapping horsey woman who had written scores of other works. I was staggered that it was her only book, that she was an invalid living at home, and that during her final illness it took her seven years to die she wrote Black Beauty.

Though you could hardly call it writing, since she dictated it to her mother a paragraph at a time. The amazing thing is tht the joints don't show and that a coherent book came out of it." It is equally surprising that spnieone who was lamed in an accident at 16, and remained crippled for the rest of her life, should have come to know with such precise detail so much horse-lore. Lady Chitty hints that since Miss Sewell's mother was a strict Quaker, given to dispersing her children's dinners to the poor, Anna may have suffered from malnutrition, somewhat at odds with her middle-class situation; BUT BEING lame certainly meant that she relied mostly on a pony and trap as a means of getting about, and much of her knowledge of horses was gained from this experience. She probably rode very little on horseback, and Black Beauty is mostly in harness in the book; indeed half the book is devoted to the experience of "a London pab horse. "Her mother, who wrote- bestselling homely ballads for the working classes in a sentimental style quite unlike Anna's dry, factual tone, was a very bad influence on her.

She devoured her," says Lady Chitty. "She had no escape from her and her constant illness was probably a way of having her own identity. At least confined to bed she was more or less free from her mother. She spent, on two occasions, a year at a spa, when officially no treatment there was supposed to last more than six months, which does suggest that it was a way of becoming free of her mother. "On the second occasion she was so cured that she came home and could walk, which is really extraordinary.

Her other symptoms, such as a total inability to concentrate on reading or writing, obviously could have been psychosomatic ones. "I always thought the lameness was physical, but even that disappeared away from the mother. I think her illness was a form of escape just as it was to EJorence Nightingale who was born in the same year; she retired to her sick bed and led a very full life safely locked behind the bedroom door." 1 them out, she wrote sparingly and had a real gift. "It was never written as a children's book, but as a book for those members of the working class who worked with horses, so it was written intentionally in a rather simple way. Horses have a great appeal to' children and a really well-written book about them is likely to last a very long time.

She really got inside the horse's skin. As you know it is an autobiography of a horse and the number of those you could count on the fingers of one hand. Of those, it is the only one which makes you feel what it is like to be broken in, to have a crupper pushed under your tail, to wear shoes for the first time. That is its I think." This extraordinary sympathy with the horse, the emotional response 'she ob SUSAN CHITTY believes that she wrote no other books because her mother considered herself the writer in the family. Anna, while able to hobble, was the housekeeper: an exacting task in Victorian times and one unlikely to allow for novel-writing on the side.

"She had to keep an eye on the servants' morals, preach little sermons, collect scraps of bread for bread-puddings and when she wasn't doing that, she was giving evening classes to laborers. Of course she had other books in her if her-life had taken another turn. 1 think she wrote very well economically and with quite a poetic feeling for the English countryside. The thing that is hard to swallow in her work is the preaching the grooms will keep getting up and giving little sermons. But if one could cut Pleasurable Dining lviiivTve 'Tv' JJuLer Jutland Central at 5th LINGERIE FABRICS TRIM NYLON TRICOT 108" Wide 1 Yd.

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