A Little Princess

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's London boarding school as the adored only child of a rich father home from India — given a private sitting-room, a maid, and a magnificent doll, and fawned over as the school's “show pupil.” She is clever, imaginative, and, almost in spite of her riches, unfailingly kind.

Then word comes that Captain Crewe has died, and that the diamond mine meant to make Sara's fortune has ruined them both. In a single afternoon she falls from princess to pauper. Miss Minchin, cheated of her fees, banishes the child to a freezing attic and sets her to run errands and slave in the kitchen for her keep.

Cold, hungry, and worked past exhaustion, Sara holds to a private rule — that what makes a princess is not a fortune but the way one behaves, especially when behaving well brings no reward and no one is watching. She befriends the scullery-maid Becky, feeds a beggar-child when she is half-starved herself, and keeps hold of who she is by “supposing” the bare attic into something grander. And then, one impossible night, the cold room begins, as if by magic, to fill with warmth and plenty.

Tender, sharp-eyed, and quietly radical, A Little Princess is a story about dignity that no one can take away and imagination that no circumstance can starve. More than a century on, it remains one of the best-loved books ever written for children.