Frances Hodgson Burnett gave the world The Secret Garden — but her other masterpiece, A Little Princess, is in some ways the braver book, because it asks what makes a person worthy of dignity when everything has been taken away.
Sara Crewe is a rich, imaginative girl, indulged at an expensive London school — until her father dies ruined, and overnight she is stripped of everything and made a servant in the same school, sleeping in a freezing attic, half-starved, mocked by those who fawned on her the day before. The genius of the book is Sara’s refusal to let her circumstances define her. ‘Whatever comes,’ she tells herself, ‘cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside.’
It is one of the great children’s books about the difference between what you have and who you are — about kindness kept alive in cruelty, imagination as a form of resistance, and the quiet insistence that no one’s worth depends on their fortune. Generations of children have carried Sara’s private code into their own hard days.
This edition gathers Burnett’s complete works, including The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Read The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett →
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