A Little Princess

I absolutely adore this book so so much! Have been addicted to it sense I was 8 years old. I still remember when I got the chance to look at my library's storage full with old books and others that wasn't on the public bookshelf's and found an old book from the 30's, I think, with this novella. It's still one of the best moments of my life! :)

Though the cover looks like a little kid book, the actual story is really good and I loved reading it growing up

I hadn't really read A Little Princess before now. Sure I read the extremely simple children's edition, with ginormous print, and black and white illustrations taking up almost every other page, but this was different, better. The first thing that caught my eye about this book was the cover, (it's GORGEOUS!) but seeing that the book itself was A Little Princess was wonderful. I have always meant to read all of the classic again, in their fuller, more detailed versions, but I've hardly ever gotten around to doing it. I knew the gist of the book, rich girl is rich, looses father, becomes poor, lives as a "servant", and finally reclaims her wealth, but this book made the character come more alive to be than they ever were before. Sara is a wonderful character, fiery when she needs to be, but kind to everyone she meets. She falls on hard times, but doesn't let it discourage her too much. Of course, she breaks down every now and again, just like any normal human would, but she's a surprisingly strong, and resilient character. This is a longer review than I usually write (sometimes I don't even write one!), but I felt that I had to express how classic this book is, and how great it will be for young girls to read.

She had meant it to be rather a secret, and here was Lavinia deriding it before nearly all the school. She felt the blood rush up into her face and tingle in her ears. She only just saved herself. If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages. Her hand dropped, and she stood quite still a moment. When she spoke it was in a quiet, steady voice; she held her head up, and everybody listened to her. “It’s true,” she said. “Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”

I’m removing my rating because I’m too conflicted: I adored

A Little Princess when I was a little girl, and the nostalgia of revisiting it was enjoyable…but it has little appeal as an adult. Until now I’ve been rating books I read as a kid based on my feelings when I was the target audience, and by that metric this novel would be a five-star read, but reading it today it would earn a solid two stars. (Edit: I've decided to rate this edition two stars and

rate a different edition five stars.) Quite simply, it is not good children’s literature.

The problem with

A Little Princess is that it is heavily didactic (as Victorian children’s fiction was apparently wont to be—while

A Little Princess is technically Edwardian, the short story that Burnett later expanded into the novel was indeed published in the 1880s), to the point of being incredibly dull and inducing an uncomfortable amount of eye-rolling. Sara is unequivocally perfect in every way: polite and proper, even in her very rare bouts of anger (generally a selfless, righteous anger about the mistreatment of other people); kind to all; incredibly bright, well-educated, and dedicated to her studies, which come easily to her; generous with her things and also with her time, always happy to tutor those otherwise unteachable, entertain children of all ages held enraptured by her storytelling, or care for troublesome children that nobody else can handle; sensitive to the plight of others less fortunate, even after her own fortune has taken a turn; oddly pretty but not vain; badly spoiled by her father but perfectly behaved; and always, always in control of her emotions and never, ever complaining but suffering in silence with unwavering optimism. There are a handful of moments in which she’s tempted to misbehave or think something wrong, but she always checks herself and reminds the reader about how responding in anger or telling lies or whatnot is very wrong and how she needs to maintain the manners of a princess. Even her eccentricities—her old-fashionedness and wild imagination—are beloved. Everyone either adores her and happily recognizes her perfection, or hate her because they’re envious about how perfect she is.

It’s enough to make one want to scream. I don't hate Sara: I just feel like I’m being lectured. One can easily imagine Victorian mothers/governesses holding Sara up as an example of how little girls should behave, with the oft-repeated moral of the story—behaving well, not wealth or status, is the mark of a princess—clearly intended to invite imitation. I also don't believe that such a child exists, and find her very, very difficult to care about.

Then there’s the way Burnett treats the secondary characters. Sara, her father, and his associates are all handsome and irreproachable. All other characters, including Sara’s friends (if you can call them that—due to her superiority and self-sufficiency, they feel more like charity cases) are ugly, stupid, wicked, or a mix of the three. There is no nuance to them, with the “good” ones having no real redeeming qualities besides kindness and the “bad” ones having no redeeming qualities at all. It’s tiresome and predictable.

The plot itself is a saccharine Cinderella retelling: Sara is wealthy and the envy of all, she loses everything, she is pitiable and long-suffering while remaining kind and continually demonstrating her natural goodness, it ends happily ever after. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with this, but I can only take so many pages spent wallowing in the misery of a perfect character (that is, the narrative wallows—Sara never does as she is

I will say that the prose is absolutely lovely and surpassed my expectations. Burnett is a capable stylist, and her descriptions are delightful and luxurious without ever feeling dense. Sara’s dresses are delightful to read about, and her attic room seems quite charming, Melchisedec included, with its rooftop view. All told, the writing is quite atmospheric. The novel is both a beautiful and easy read, and could have been such a lovely novel if Burnett had only been willing to give Sara some flaws and the opportunity for character growth.

I will not be rereading, and it is unlikely that I’ll try anything else by Burnett (unless it’s in the hope that not all of her novels are like this.)

Some favorite passages:

Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

She was a slim, supple creature, rather tall for her age, and had an intense, attractive little face. Her hair was heavy and quite black and only curled at the tips; her eyes were greenish gray, it is true, but they were big, wonderful eyes with long, black lashes, and though she herself did not like the color of them, many other people did.

the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person.

Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know”⁠—looking quite serious⁠—“how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

but “diamond-mines” sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

“Chimneys⁠—quite close to us⁠—with smoke curling up in wreaths and clouds and going up into the sky⁠—and sparrows hopping about and talking to each other just as if they were people⁠—and other attic windows where heads may pop out any minute and you can wonder who they belong to. And it all feels as high up⁠—as if it was another world.”

The slates spread out on either side of them and slanted down into the rain gutter-pipes. The sparrows, being at home there, twittered and hopped about quite without fear. Two of them perched on the chimney-top nearest and quarrelled with each other fiercely until one pecked the other and drove him away. The garret window next to theirs was shut because the house next door was empty.

The slanting ceiling is so funny. See, you can scarcely stand up at this end of the room; and when the morning begins to come I can lie in bed and look right up into the sky through that flat window in the roof. It is like a square patch of light. If the sun is going to shine, little pink clouds float about, and I feel as if I could touch them. And if it rains, the drops patter and patter as if they were saying something nice. Then if there are stars, you can lie and try to count how many go into the patch. It takes such a lot.

There were fine sunsets even in the square, sometimes. One could only see parts of them, however, between the chimneys and over the roofs. From the kitchen windows one could not see them at all, and could only guess that they were going on because the bricks looked warm and the air rosy or yellow for a while, or perhaps one saw a blazing glow strike a particular pane of glass somewhere. There was, however, one place from which one could see all the splendor of them: the piles of red or gold clouds in the west; or the purple ones edged with dazzling brightness; or the little fleecy, floating ones, tinged with rose-color and looking like flights of pink doves scurrying across the blue in a great hurry if there was a wind. The place where one could see all this, and seem at the same time to breathe a purer air, was, of course, the attic window.

And there Sara would stand, sometimes turning her face upward to the blue which seemed so friendly and near⁠—just like a lovely vaulted ceiling⁠—sometimes watching the west and all the wonderful things that happened there: the clouds melting or drifting or waiting softly to be changed pink or crimson or snow-white or purple or pale dove-gray. Sometimes they made islands or great mountains enclosing lakes of deep turquoise-blue, or liquid amber, or chrysoprase-green; sometimes dark headlands jutted into strange, lost seas; sometimes slender strips of wonderful lands joined other wonderful lands together.

I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

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Original review (5 stars): I remember loving the atmosphere of this as a kid, from the luxury and glamor that Sara (spelled without an "h," which seemed so unique and beautiful to me) initially enjoys to her sad, perhaps slightly gothic existence as a servant in the attic. It didn't hurt that pink was my favorite color and I loved the dress on the cover of the copy I owned… And what little girl doesn't love a Cinderella story?

This rating reflects how much I loved

A Little Princess, which I reread numerous times, as a little girl; unfortunately I reread it in 2023 and had

a very different experience.