I recently had a very pleasant short holiday in Bath, a city I hadn’t visited for some time. One of the things I learned while there is that Anna Sewell (1820-1878) lived in Bath for a while with her parents from 1860. And that reminded me that it’s many years since I read her very famous (and only) novel, Black Beauty, so I have now revisited it.  And first surprising thing is that, although it’s been marketed and perceived as a childrens’s novel since its publication nearly 150 years ago in 1877, she intended it for adults.

In case you’ve grown up on a different planet let me remind me that it’s a first person narrative by a horse who’s sold and resold several times, which Sewell uses as a vehicle to promote animal welfare – this, bearing in mind that, when all road transport was dependent on horses, welfare issues weren’t necessarily top of the agenda for most people. What fun it is, incidentally, to reflect in the 21^st century that we still measure vehicle capability in “horsepower.”

What, as a mature adult, I liked about Black Beauty is that it isn’t anthropomorphic. Black Beauty and the other horses he is associated with can talk to each other. And they understand what human beings are saying although they cannot speak to them. Apart from these devices to allow the story to be told, Sewell’s horses are horses through and through. They eat grain and love apples. They sweat and get ill if they’re not rubbed down. They adore meadows and hate dark stables. They swish off flies. Their knees are vulnerable. When they can no longer work they will be shot and sent “to the dogs”. And I suppose they mate – or are gelded –  but this is Victorian England so she never mentions it.

Sewell’s purpose is to raise awareness of horse needs and feelings. I was never a horsey child and this was where I first learned about the cruelty of the check rain – the habit of strapping a horse’s head at an unnaturally high angle for reasons of fashion. It is desperately uncomfortable for the horse and makes it difficult to exert the power required, for example, to drag a heavy load uphill. Humane drivers and grooms will give a horse its head. And there’s the origin of yet another everyday expression. I suppose it’s inevitable that so many of our idioms are horse-related. People used horses for thousands of years. We’ve had mechanised road transport for barely 125 years.

“Flogging a dead horse” is another. Sewell is moving on the use of the whip. Through her equine narrator, she asserts that it should rarely be necessary and then – if the driver is competent and the animal complaint because it’s never been ill-treated – only a brush across the horse’s back. A well-treated horse, we learn, almost always knows what its driver or rider needs. And we see Black Beauty in a whole range of working situations: mount for a lady in a big house, carriage horse, cab horse, haulier’s horse, pulling a hearse and a lot more. And other horses tell him about their experience elsewhere – in the hunt, for instance.  In the end, with narrative neatness, he comes more or less back to where he started and the novel ends quite hopefully. It certainly drives home the message that horses were a key part of almost every aspect of everyday life in 1877.

Sewell’s message doesn’t stop with horses either. She also brings in a pitiful litter of puppies whose ears have been cruelly mutilated (“cropped”) for no reason other than fashion. She presents them in pain and bleeding and it’s quite distressing.

I do like the way though that Beauty and his fellow horses have some nasty experiences but also some very good ones. Many people are kind, decent and good at we’d now call “empathy” with animals. Her point of view is balanced and reasonable. And it was very innovative at the time to take an animal as your post of observation.

Poor Anna Sewell’s life was beset by illness. She had a serious accident in childhood which affected her for a long time. In adult life she was ill – and bed-ridden – for many years before her early death at age 58, probably from tuberculosis but maybe hepatitis – or both. She lived only five months after the publication of Black Beauty but it was an instant success so presumably she died secure in the knowledge that she had achieved something worthwhile. I hope so.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover

Lace isn’t the kind of book you forget in a hurry and I have vivid memories of reading it on a family camping holiday in France in 1983 when it had just come out in paperback. My overriding impression, 41 years later, is that there was an awful lot of sex. There is, but maybe not quite as much as I remembered.

Shirley Conran, whose fortune this novel made, died last month and it was reading her obituaries, and social media discussion about her work, which prompted me to return to Lace to see what I think now.

The plot is neat. Four very different young women are at finishing school in Switzerland just after the war. One of them gets pregnant. Now, the resultant child, a world-famous actor in her twenties, wants to know which of them was her mother. So at one level it’s the old “suo padre, sua madre” device as in the Marriage of Figaro and hundreds of other  “parentage reveal” fictions.  It takes Conran hundreds of pages – the novel is as fat as David Copperfield – to unravel all this with lots of diving back and forth in the chronology and plenty of distraction, along with the same incident  often being presented from more than one perspective, because there are five protagonists although it’s a third person narrative.

The sex is graphic and always from the female point of view which was refreshing in 1982 and to an extent still is. She’s very concerned about female orgasm and that really wasn’t much discussed when I first read Lace so it probably helped to liberate attitides and maybe in a small way even to educate. There are also ugly scenes of male domination, violence and exploitation which somehow feel less false and contrived than the consensual sex. She is, however, very good at getting into the mindset of sex-obsessed young women who have a lot more curiosity than experience – yup, that’s exactly how it was even in the 1960s in my girls’ grammar school.

How do you break into a big complex plot? Often from a side alley.  Think of Tolstoy’s unhappy Oblonsky family, Daphne du Maurier’s burning Manderley or Jane Austen’s famous observations about rich men and girls in need of them. There is no plot-driving reason to open Lace with thirteen year old Lili’s abortion without anaesthetic. As an incident it’s peripheral but, clunky as it is structurally, it makes an excruciatingly arresting first few pages and draws the reader in.

I think Conran over-eggs the “glamour” rather tiresomely.  I got, on this reread,  pretty weary of reading about clothes and luxurious rooms. Of course there’s a bit of squalor too but much less.  Women liked this book – it sold over 3 million copies. I wonder how many men read it? Did adolescents read it for titillation as my generation read Peyton Place? My elder son was 11 during that camping holiday and I’d always told both my children that they could read anything they wanted without any form of parental censorship. “Would you let me read Lace?” he asked me with a grin because he’d seen it in my hand for days and, for all I know, dipped into it on the quiet. “Yes” I said, after a bit of a gulp. “But I’m not sure you’d understand or like it”. I don’t know whether he ever did.

Most novelists firmly assert (to avoid litigation, I’ve always assumed) that their characters are entirely fictitious. Conran does the opposite. At the end of Lace she cheerfully declares that hers are nearly all based on real people – and she tells us who they are, too. I can’t help wondering how many friends or enemies that made her at the time because she isn’t polite about them all. Of course the finishing school is based on the one she attended.

It’s not a brilliant novel. There are flaws. But in its way it broke new ground and did its bit for feminism. It is, however, still a page turner and much more than a “bonkbuster”. I re-read it in just a few days and, once again, she held my attention to the end. So I’m glad, on balance, that Conran had such a success with it.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell