A Little Princess

The classic children’s novel A Little Princess; Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Told for the First Time was published in 1905. In this work, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), a celebrated Anglo-American novelist and playwright who is also known for the novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1910), expands her earlier novella, Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's (1888), which had originally been serialized in St. Nicholas’ Magazine (1887).

Burnett explains in her preface to A Little Princess that when she wrote a play in 1902 based on her 1888 novella, she discovered characters such as Becky, Lottie, and Melchisedec, who had been left out in 1888 because the imaginary characters “did not mention themselves to me at first” (vi). After the success of this play, Burnett’s publisher requested that she add those missing characters to her novella and expand it as a full-length novel, making the novel her third work involving Sara Crewe. The novel is set in a boarding school in late Victorian England and reflects the era’s social structures—including the protagonist’s father’s role in colonizing

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