A Little Princess Summary: Sara Crewe, Miss Minchin and the Attic Years
What it is about
A Little Princess follows Sara Crewe, the daughter of a wealthy English army captain stationed in India. Because the Indian climate was thought too harsh for British children, families posted there sent their children home to school in England. So Captain Ralph Crewe, a widower, brings his seven-year-old daughter to a girls' boarding school in London and pays the headmistress, Miss Minchin, for special treatment and considerable luxuries.
Sara is clever, imaginative and generous. The other pupils treat her as a kind of princess, and she takes the title seriously, not as a licence to show off but as a standard of behaviour to live up to. She sees straight through Miss Minchin's flattery and is not spoiled by any of it.
Four years pass. On the day of Sara's eleventh birthday, celebrated with a lavish party at the school, Miss Minchin receives news that Captain Crewe has died of jungle fever and that his estate is bankrupt after failed investments in diamond mining. Sara is suddenly an orphan with no money, and Miss Minchin is left out of pocket for fees and extravagances already supplied. The headmistress does not turn her out, because the scandal would damage the school. Instead she strips Sara of everything except her doll Emily and an old black frock, and moves her into the cold, dusty attic.
What follows is two years of hunger, overwork and humiliation. Sara becomes an unpaid servant and tutor. The book is the story of how she survives that, and what happens next.
The novel has a tangled publishing history. It began as the novella Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's, serialised in St. Nicholas Magazine from December 1887 and published as a book in 1888. Burnett then wrote a stage version, A Little Un-fairy Princess, in 1902. Her publisher asked her to expand the story into a full-length novel with "the things and people that had been left out before". That book appeared in 1905 from Charles Scribner's Sons, illustrated by Ethel Franklin Betts, under the full title A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Being Told for the First Time.
The main characters
Sara Crewe is the centre of the book. Her defining quality is not courage exactly, but a refusal to let circumstance change her conduct. She stays polite to people who abuse her, on the principle that behaviour rather than money makes a princess.
Miss Minchin is one of children's literature's great hypocrites. She fawns over rich pupils while privately resenting them, and her cruelty to Sara is driven as much by wounded pride and lost income as by malice.
Sara's friends come from the bottom of the school's pecking order. Ermengarde is the school dunce. Lottie is a four-year-old prone to tantrums. Becky is the undersized scullery maid, and she lives in the attic too. Sara's kindness to them before her fall is what sustains her after it.
Outside the school there is the "Large Family", the big, affectionate household of the solicitor Mr Carmichael, whom Sara watches from the street and who call her "the little girl who is not a beggar". Next door to the school lives Mr Carrisford, a very rich invalid recently returned from abroad, and his Indian servant Ram Dass.
The themes
Class runs through everything. Sara is treated well when she is rich and badly when she is poor, by the same people, for no other reason. Burnett makes the point without lecturing: the girl is identical either way, only her bank balance has changed.
Imagination is the second great theme. Sara survives the attic by telling herself stories about it, and by deciding that she is a princess in disguise. The book takes make-believe seriously as a tool for endurance rather than escapism.
Then there is generosity. The famous scene has Sara, starving, finding a fourpenny coin and buying six buns, then giving five to a beggar-child who is hungrier than she is. The baker notices and takes the child in. Kindness in this book is practical and it has consequences.
How it ends
Mr Carrisford was Captain Crewe's partner in the diamond mines. When the venture seemed lost and both men were gravely ill, Carrisford abandoned his friend and wandered in a delirium. By the time he recovered, the captain was dead and the mines had become profitable. He has been searching for Sara ever since, blaming himself.
Ram Dass climbs the roof to retrieve a runaway pet monkey, sees the state of Sara's attic and is struck by her manner. He and his master secretly transform her room with food, warmth and books. Sara calls her unknown benefactor "The Magician". When the monkey strays again and Sara carries it back next door, the two discover the truth about each other. She becomes Carrisford's ward and a wealthy heiress through her father's share of the mines. Miss Minchin threatens legal action and is silenced by the threat of exposure. Sara returns to the baker in fine clothes and arranges to pay for bread for any hungry child.
Why it still matters
The book has lasted because the attic is as vivid as the rescue. Burnett lets Sara be genuinely cold and genuinely hungry, and she lets the cruelty be ordinary rather than fantastical. Children recognise the injustice of being judged by what your parents have. The rewritten, expanded 1905 version is the one still read, and its central idea has proved portable: hold your conduct steady and you remain yourself, whatever anyone takes from you.
