A Little Princess

I picked up A Little Princess because I had just finished The Secret Garden and wanted to see what else Frances Hodgson Burnett could do with lonely rich kids. This one came first in its full form. Burnett first published it as a book in 1905 with Charles Scribner's Sons, after an 1888 novella called Sara Crewe and a 1902 stage play. My reading follows the 272 page Penguin Classics paperback. It is the story of Sara Crewe, a clever girl at a London boarding school who loses her father and her money and has to find out whether being a princess is about silk dresses or about how you treat people when you own nothing.

Sara starts the book at seven, riding in a cab through London fog with her father, Captain Richard Crewe. He is young, handsome, rich from business interests in India, and completely devoted to her. Her mother is dead. Sara has spent her early years in India, raised by servants and her father, reading his books, asking grown up questions, making up long stories. Captain Crewe brings her to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies in London because he has to go back to India to look after his diamond mines investment. He wants her to have schooling and friends her own age.

Miss Minchin runs the school with her soft younger sister Miss Amelia. Minchin is tall, imposing, fond of dignity and fees. She takes one look at Sara, hears about the fortune, and decides Sara will be the show pupil. Sara gets the best bedroom, a private sitting room, a carriage, a pony, a French maid, dolls and lace dresses and books. Minchin shows her off to parents. The other girls stare. Some admire her. Some hate her on sight.

Sara is worth staring at, but not for the dresses. She is dark haired, green eyed, thin, with an odd old fashioned way of talking. She reads fast. She remembers everything. She makes up stories out loud and acts them. She tells the younger children that dolls can walk and talk when humans leave the room. She is kind without working at it. When Lottie, a spoiled little girl of four, screams for her dead mama in the hall, Sara picks her up and tells her a story about lost mamas watching from heaven until Lottie stops crying and follows her everywhere. When Ermengarde St. John, a dull heavy girl with a kind heart and a father who expects prizes she cannot win, struggles with French lessons, Sara helps her without making her feel stupid. When Becky, the fourteen year old scullery maid, listens at doors because stories are the only pretty thing in her life, Sara invites her in for cake and calls her a guest.

The villain of the early chapters is Lavinia Herbert, the former show pupil, blond and spiteful, who mocks Sara's accents and stories and waits for a fall. Burnett does not hide who to root for. Minchin loves money. Lavinia loves rank. Sara loves books and people. Monsieur Dufarge, the French master, adores Sara because she already speaks French from her Indian childhood and because she defends Ermengarde. The cook likes her. The housemaids like her. Only Minchin's love is conditional, and the reader feels that condition like a cold draft.

The diamond mines

Captain Crewe means well and ruins everything with love. He writes Sara long funny letters. He sends dolls with whole wardrobes. He tells his friend Tom Carrisford about a diamond mine scheme in India that will make them rich beyond worry. Carrisford is sick and anxious. Crewe is confident and generous. They put everything in.

At school, Sara plays at being a princess. She tells Ermengarde that being rich is an accident and behaving like a princess means being polite to rude people, giving away the last bun, holding your temper when Lavinia pinches. She pretends the schoolroom is the Bastille when Minchin scolds her for sharing books. She pretends her attic doll Emily can hear. The other girls crowd her sittings room at night for chapters of invented adventure. Even Jessie, Lavinia's follower, sneaks over to listen.

Then the news comes on Sara's eleventh birthday. There is a party in the schoolroom, ices and cakes and presents piled high. Miss Minchin is at her grandest. A messenger arrives with a letter from the lawyer, Mr. Barrow. Captain Crewe is dead in India of jungle fever. The diamond mines have failed. There is no money. Nothing is left but debts. Minchin reads the letter, turns white, and walks into the party to stop it cold.

What follows is one of the meanest reversals in children's books, and Burnett writes it without blinking. Minchin does not send Sara to relatives because there are none. She does not send her to the workhouse because that would look bad. She keeps her as a servant. She takes the dresses, the books, the doll's clothes. She moves Sara to a bare attic room next to Becky. She tells Sara she must earn her bread by teaching French to little ones, running errands in all weather, scrubbing, carrying coal, answering bells. Sara, still in her party frock with the news fresh, says very little. She goes upstairs and cries into Emily, the one doll Minchin lets her keep because it is worn out.

In the attic

The middle of the book is Sara in the attic, and it is much harder than the early pretty chapters. Burnett piles on cold, hunger, tired feet, broken boots, chilblains, and humiliation. Sara gets up before light to clean grates. She teaches French to babies who chew pencils. She is sent out in rain to buy buns and soap with coins counted twice. She comes home to find Minchin waiting with a complaint from a parent or a broken washbasin charged to her account. Lavinia trips her in passages and tells new girls that Sara is a pauper who thinks she is better than servants. Miss Amelia pities her but obeys her sister. Only Becky loves her openly, and Becky has almost nothing to give except company.

Sara survives by pretending, and Burnett makes pretending sound like work rather than escape. Sara tells herself she is still a princess, only a prisoner one, like Marie Antoinette in the Bastille. She speaks French to the pigeons on the roof. She shares stories with Becky at night when both should be asleep. She finds a rat in the attic, names him Melchisedec after the Bible, feeds him crumbs, and refuses to set a trap. She takes Lottie under her wing still, though she has no time. She gives her own thin shawl to a shivering beggar girl on the street one Christmas week even though she is starving herself. That scene matters because a gentleman watching from a carriage notices.

Hunger is described in plain detail. Sara finds a sixpence in the gutter, buys six hot buns from a bakery, and hands five to the beggar child before eating one herself. She dreams of food. She eats cold scraps in the kitchen while the cook scolds and then slips her extra potatoes. She wears out her shoes and stuffs them with paper. She coughs from the cold attic air. Burnett had known poverty after her father's death in Manchester and her family's move to Tennessee, and those pages feel observed rather than borrowed.

Minchin gets worse as Sara gets thinner. She catches Sara giving a French history book to Becky and calls it forwardness. She catches Sara sitting with Lottie and calls it idling. She locks Sara in her room without supper for answering back when Lavinia mocks her dead father. Burnett lets Minchin be fully cruel here, then adds small cracks. Miss Amelia once brings bread secretly. The cook once lets Becky warm herself. Ermengarde brings books and apples and is punished for it. Lottie cries for Sara. The school starts to split between those who obey Minchin and those who slip kindness past her.

The large family and the Indian gentleman

Two new forces enter from the houses behind the school, and they change the temperature of the book. On one side lives the Large Family, with kind parents and many children with names and noise: Donald, Janet, Nora, Guy, and the baby. Sara watches them from the attic window. She makes up names and games for them. She calls the father Mr. Montmorency. One day she helps their runaway monkey, and Donald's mother sends her kindness back in smiles and coins. Those chapters give Sara an audience again. She tells attic stories to Becky about the Large Family's suppers while both are hungry, which sounds bleak and reads as brave.

On the other side moves in an Indian gentleman, sick and sad, with an Indian servant named Ram Dass. The gentleman is Mr. Carrisford, her father's friend, back from India broken by fever and guilt. He believes his mine scheme killed Captain Crewe and ruined Sara, and he does not know the lost child lives next door. He searches for her through lawyers and the Carmichael family, honest kind people with children of their own, while Sara scrubs steps a few yards away. The closeness is almost painful. Burnett stretches it on purpose. Carrisford coughs behind shutters. Sara coughs in the attic. Ram Dass crosses roofs with soft feet.

The monkey belongs to Ram Dass. It escapes to Sara's attic, and Ram Dass climbs over to fetch it. He sees Sara, Becky, Melchisedec, the bare room, the brave talk. He reports back. Carrisford, who cannot sleep for guilt, listens and starts to plan. He asks no permission from Minchin. He has Ram Dass carry food, blankets, warm clothes, books, a lamp, and small comforts across the roof while the girls are out. One freezing night Sara and Becky return to find a fire lit, a table spread with hot soup and roast and cake, new mattresses, thick quilts, and magic as Sara calls it. They eat and weep and think they are dreaming.

Burnett calls this section the magic, and modern readers will either love it or argue with it. Ram Dass keeps crossing with coal and pies. A new stove appears. Warm dresses appear. Books appear. Minchin notices nothing because she never climbs to the attic unless to scold. Becky starts to look less pinched. Sara starts to teach again with strength. The Large Family watches lights and shadows and thinks a fairy tale is happening. Donald throws coins. Carrisford watches Sara through the window without knowing her name and loves her spirit. It is pure wish fulfillment after a hundred pages of hunger, and Burnett knows it. She has Sara say outright that suppose it is true still leaves room for work tomorrow.

What holds up and what creaks

What holds up best is Sara herself. She is not sweet in a flat way. She has a temper. She answers Minchin sharply when her father is insulted. She sulks. She feels superior to Lavinia and has to correct herself. She gets tired of Ermengarde's slowness and then ashamed. She tells stories partly to rule the room. That mix keeps her believable across a long book. Her kindness has a code. She will not show she is hurt when Lavinia sneers. She will lend books she loves. She will stand between Becky and blame even when it costs supper. Kids remember that code because it can be copied at school without money.

Becky holds up too. She is not a prop. She has a Yorkshire voice, sore hands, a history of beatings, and her own humor. Her friendship with Sara is uneven in rank but level in loyalty. When Sara shares the magic supper, Becky tries to refuse extra cake because servants should not take so much, and Sara has to order her as a princess to eat. That little struggle says more about class than any speech. Ermengarde also grows. She starts as comic relief, all tears and parcels from home, and ends as the girl who saves coins to buy Sara a book and who stands up to Lavinia at last. Lottie stays small and funny and true.

What creaks is the empire around the edges. India exists mostly as heat, servants, wealth, and fever. Captain Crewe makes money there without Burnett showing whose labor makes it. Ram Dass is wise, graceful, silent, and largely there to serve Carrisford's guilt and Sara's rescue. Modern readers will notice, as with The Secret Garden, that brown characters support white growth. It helps to name that while reading. The book also leans hard on coincidence. Carrisford moves in next door. The monkey runs to Sara. The lawyer finds the right street at the right hour. Burnett rushes the last chapters so the rescue lands like a stage curtain. If you like tidy endings you will cheer. If you like slow causes you may feel the strings.

Minchin is another creak, though a fun one. She is almost never confused or tired or kind for long. She exists to be wrong. Miss Amelia gets one brave scene near the end and then folds again. Lavinia never softens. That flatness works for young readers who want clear sides, but adults may wish one adult at the school had acted sooner. The Carmichaels and the Large Family are almost too good, too ready with soup and sympathy. I did not mind because the attic pages earned some soup, but the balance tips sweet in the final fifty pages.

The religion and morals also date the book. Sara talks of princesses inside, of good thoughts as magic, of God hearing rats. Carrisford talks of atonement through money. Nobody questions that a rich girl turned servant can be saved by another rich man. Sara promises to help the beggar girl and does, which softens the point, but the structure still says wealth rescues worth. Read it as 1905 and the rescue feels generous. Read it as now and you will want Becky freed too, not only Sara. Burnett partly grants that wish, which leads to the ending.

The rescue and the aftertaste

I will spoil the ending because these summaries are meant to be complete, and because most readers know it anyway. Carrisford learns through Mr. Carmichael's search and Ram Dass's roof visits that the thin servant next door is Captain Crewe's daughter. He sends for her on a false errand, sees her face, hears her voice, and breaks down. The diamond mines, thought worthless, have paid after all. Sara is an heiress again, richer than before. She does not gloat. She asks first for Becky, then for Ermengarde, then for the beggar girl, whose name is Anne and who gets a home. Minchin apologizes in a grasping way and is refused. Miss Amelia finally speaks up. Lavinia watches in silence. Sara leaves the school holding Becky's hand.

That hand holding matters. Sara insists Becky come as her companion, not her maid. Carrisford adopts them both in practice, with Ram Dass cooking and telling stories and the Large Family visiting for tea. Sara gives away money quickly: to Anne, to Ermengarde's library, to Becky's family. She tells Carrisford she wants to keep pretending she is a princess because pretending made her act kindly when she had nothing. The last image is not a ball but a home, with books and fire and people who knock before entering.

I closed the book thinking about how usable Sara's rule is. Pretend you are the person you want to be when no one would blame you for being mean. Share food when hungry. Speak politely to Lavinia when she baits you. Teach Ermengarde again even though exams bore you. It sounds simple and it is hard, which is why the attic chapters stick. Any child who has eaten lunch alone or worn the wrong shoes will recognize Sara counting buns and keeping her head up in the rain.

Who should read it

Give this to readers around eight to twelve who like school stories, orphans, kind servants, mean headmistresses, hidden food, and rescues. It pairs well with Matilda, Harry Potter, and The Secret Garden, though it is gentler than the first two and less outdoorsy than the third. Read aloud works because Sara's stories inside the story invite voices. Short sittings help because the middle is sad. Talk about India and servants and money as you go, in plain terms, so the old frame does not pass unnoticed.

Adults who teach or parent will find tools here. Sara models how to apologize, how to refuse pity, how to thank Ram Dass without condescension, how to keep anger from turning into cruelty. Minchin models the opposite, using shame as discipline and favor as pay. The contrast is broad but useful for talk about fairness. If the final rescue feels too neat, ask what would have happened without Carrisford. The answer is in the attic: Sara and Becky would still have shared soup, still fed Melchisedec, still told stories. The money fixes the plot. The friendship was already the point.