A Little Princess: Children's Classics

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Little Sara Crewe, once pampered by her beloved father, is suddenly penniless and abandoned in a boarding school. Though she endures the mistreatment of the cruel headmistress, Miss Minchin, Sara manages to keep her kind heart despite her circumstances. This timeless story of a poor but compassionate orphan has won children over for generations.

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (1849 - 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). She was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in Jefferson City, Tennessee. There Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowrie's), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Burnett enjoyed socializing and lived a lavish lifestyle. Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life.[1] She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery. In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honour in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.

 • "Sara Crewe is a Cinderella figure... She is intelligent and good humoured with an infectious warmth that embraces the lowliest of her new acquaintances. The sunshine continues when impoverishment and drudgery befall her and she relies on her private fantasies to preserve her natural zest for life." --Guardian

 • "Generations of children have fallen in love with the story of Sara Crewe, the little girl who imagines she's a princess in order to survive the hard times." --Daily Mail
'I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one'. Without her beloved father and miles from home, it is very hard for Sara Crewe to like her new life at boarding school. Luckily Sara is always dreaming up wonderful things and her power of telling stories wins her lots of friends. When a letter arrives that brings disastrous news, the wicked headmistress Miss Minchin forces Sara to become a servant. Her lovely clothes and toys are taken away from her. She must work from dawn until midnight. How will Sara cope with her new found poverty? Can her imagination help her overcome this horrible situation? BACKSTORY: Read why Jacqueline Wilson loves this book and find out which pupil of Sara's school you are most like.

I'm not sure I could have survived childhood without Frances Hodgson Burnett. My sister and I would crawl into the attic of our suburban American house and pretend we were looking across London rooftops. We'd lost our parents and our money, but perhaps a mysterious monk would visit our miserable garret. -- Meg Rosoff Sara Crewe is a Cinderella figure... She is intelligent and good humoured with an infectious warmth that embraces the lowliest of her new acquaintances. The sunshine continues when impoverishment and drudgery befall her and she relies on her private fantasies to preserve her natural zest for life. Guardian Generations of children have fallen in love with the story of Sara Crewe, the little girl who imagines she's a princess in order to survive the hard times Daily Mail I read A Little Princess as a child, and from that there lingers still a whiff of the irretrievable quality of childhood reading. I was mesmerised by the account of Sara Crewe's lavish clothes; silks and satins and velvets -- Penelope Lively Independent

Perfect companion to Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden in the Alma Junior Classics collection