A Little Princess

Summary

A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking. Miss Minchin flatters her for her money and dislikes her for her cleverness, while the spiteful Lavinia envies her. Sara does not become spoiled. She befriends slow, plump Ermengarde St. John, mothers the motherless four-year-old Lottie, tells stories to the whole schoolroom, and treats Becky, the overworked scullery maid, as a fellow human being, feeding her cakes and letting her sleep by the fire. She pretends that she is a princess, and decides that a princess must be gracious to everyone. On her eleventh birthday, in the middle of a lavish party, the solicitor Mr. Barrow arrives with news that Captain Crewe has died of jungle fever and business troubles after a friend's diamond-mine scheme seemed to ruin him. Sara is left penniless. Miss Minchin takes away her clothes and toys and sends her to a cold attic beside Becky's, where she works as an errand girl and teacher of the little ones in shabby, outgrown dresses, half starved and scolded by the cook. Sara endures by imagination and pride: soldiers do not complain, she tells herself, and she pretends that the attic is a prison in the Bastille, makes friends with a rat she names Melchisedec, and tries to stay a princess inside. Next door lives an invalid Indian Gentleman, Mr. Carrisford, tended by his servant Ram Dass, whose monkey escapes across the roofs to Sara's window. Carrisford was Captain Crewe's partner; believing he had ruined his friend, he fell ill with brain fever, and now the mines have made him rich while he searches Europe, through the lawyer Mr. Carmichael, for the lost child. One bitter day Sara finds fourpence in the mud, buys hot buns, and gives five of her six to a beggar girl hungrier than she. Ram Dass, watching from the roof, and Carrisford begin secretly to transform her attic with a fire, food, blankets and books, a Magic that comforts both girls. When the monkey runs away again and Sara returns him, Carrisford learns who she is. Sara becomes his ward, Becky her attendant, Miss Amelia finally speaks back to her sister, and the beggar girl Anne is taken in by the baker woman. Burnett first told the story as the novella Sara Crewe (1888) and as a stage play; Scribner's published the expanded novel in 1905.

Top Lessons

• A princess inside

  Sara decides that being a princess is not about clothes but about behaving graciously, and she holds to that rule in the attic, answering Miss Minchin's insults with silence and treating servants and beggars with courtesy. Dignity is something she practices rather than something she owns.

• Giving when you are hungry

  In the bun shop Sara is starving herself, yet she gives five buns away because the beggar girl is hungrier. Burnett shows that generosity is tested most when it costs something, and the baker woman's later kindness to Anne grows out of that one act.

• Imagination as courage

  Sara turns the attic into the Bastille, a rat into a father with a family, and a bare table into a banquet. Her stories are not lies to escape the world; they are a way to bear it bravely and to share comfort with Becky, Ermengarde and Lottie.

• Kindness that crosses the wall

  Ram Dass and Mr. Carrisford help Sara in secret, without wanting thanks, while Sara herself befriends Becky across the attic wall. The book pairs kindness from above with kindness from below, and both are needed for the happy ending.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Illness drives the plot. Captain Crewe dies in India of what the solicitor calls jungle fever and business troubles combined, a typical late-Victorian way of joining tropical fever to mental strain. His partner Mr. Carrisford suffers 'brain fever', the period's catch-all name for a delirious illness brought on by shock and worry; Mr. Carmichael reminds him that he was strapped down in a hospital raving, and Carrisford recalls that he had not slept for weeks and saw mocking shapes in the air. Readers sometimes read his long invalidism as nervous collapse from guilt, but that is an interpretation; the novel itself keeps to the vocabulary of fever. The attic chapters give a plain account of chronic hunger and cold in a child servant's life, and Becky's exhaustion and Sara's thinness are noticed by the cook, the pupils and the baker woman. The secret gifts of fire, blankets and hot food work almost as a course of nursing. Sara's grief for her father is shown through her silent, rigid self-control after the news.

• Chapter 7, The Diamond Mines Again

  Mr. Barrow tells Miss Minchin that Captain Crewe died of jungle fever combined with the strain of his business losses.

• Chapter 12, The Other Side of the Wall

  Carrisford and Carmichael recall Carrisford's flight, sleeplessness, delirium and hospital confinement with brain fever.

• Chapters 8 and 13

  Sara and Becky go to bed cold and hungry; the bun-shop scene shows Sara faint with hunger beside a starving beggar child.

• Chapters 15–16, The Magic and The Visitor

  Ram Dass's fire, food and blankets restore the two girls, and Carrisford's own health improves as he takes an interest in the child next door.