ABSTRACT
Mary Wright Sewell was a popular poet and author of moral tales for children, but now perhaps best remembered as the mother of Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty. Mary was the daughter of a Quaker sheep-farmer, John Wright, and his wife, Ann Holmes. Her education, like that of many of her contemporaries, was a mixture of formal schooling and home tuition from her older sister and governesses, culminating in a year at a Quaker boarding-school in Tottenham. When she was about 13, her father, worried about his declining profits, sold all his stock and went to work for a ship-owner at Yarmouth. When her father went bankrupt in 1817 she became a teacher at a school in Essex. Although Mary's first work, Walks with Mama, in words of one syllable, was written for her children, her career as an author of stories and poems did not develop until the late 1850s, when she herself was already in her sixties.
