A Little Princess Analysis

A Little Princess participates in a grand tradition of British school stories. (Like some other very famous books we could mention.) Like these books, most of it takes place at school. And what a s...

The story is told by someone who's well outside of the story. Check out the very first line: Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that t...

Sara Crewe is a real kid in some ways—she likes making up her own fairy tales, plays with dolls, and misses her daddy when he drops her off at school. But she manages to be more than just a littl...

A Little Princess isn't exactly a story about rainbows and butterflies and little girls who are princesses (despite what the title may imply). In fact, it's about death and loss and the ugliness of...

With a story for young readers written in nineteenth-century England, would we really expect anything but a writing style that remembers to cross all its T's and dot all its I's? Certainly not, goo...

Get ready, Shmoopers, because he have a lot to say here. Let's start with the easy:A Little Princess could mean two different things: it could be an acknowledgment of Sara's good breeding, or it co...

There's nothing we love more than closing the loop, as far as a story is concerned. The story could have ended with a happy Sara frolicking through the London spring with blossoms falling on her pr...

A Little Princess is told in a perfectly understandable and easy-to-read way, but as with anything that has to do with royalty, it can get a little fancy at times. Little Sara Crewe uses some compl...

Sara Starts School (And Owns It) Here's our opening scene: Sara Crewe is a "little princess": rich and doted upon by her father. When her dad drops her off at a boarding school in London, it look...

A Little Princess was inspired by an unfinished novel by another talented British lady, Charlotte Bronte. (source) The book was actually first published as a magazine serial. Too bad the Glamour an...