“I pretend I am a princess, so that
I can try and behave like one.”
When the kind and imaginative seven-year-old Sara Crewe reaches Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies with her papa, she doesn’t quite like it.
“I don’t like it, papa,” she said. “But then
I dare say soldiers—even brave ones—
don’t really like going into battle.”
The apple of her father’s eye, Sara has all the privileges at the seminary and is treated with special care. Soon enough, she befriends her classmates and is nicknamed a ‘princess’, which she often pretends to be.
But just after her eleventh birthday, when the news of her father’s death arrives, everything changes.
Will Sara Crewe’s imagination help her
cope up with the loss and hardships?
One of the all-time children’s novels, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess is a remarkable story. It has been adapted for films, theatre, musicals, and television, and continues to remain popular more than a century after its publication.
About the Author
Born in Cheetham, Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849, Frances Hodgson Burnett developed her love for reading at a very young age. With an active imagination, she wrote stories and enjoyed narrating them to her mother, cousins, and friends. In 1868, Burnett’s first story was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She had begun writing for a livelihood and wrote non-stop.
That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, her first full-length novel, was published in 1877. She started writing children’s fiction after meeting Louisa May Alcott and Mary Mapes Dodge—the editor of St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine. In the winter of 1887, she published Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s in the United States. A Little Princess, an expanded version of Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, was published in book form in September 1905. A huge success, it is still considered among children’s all-time favourite novels. Burnett published The Secret Garden in 1911. A classic of children’s literature, it became one of her most popular novels.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.