Miss Minchin's Select Seminary — the household before and after the fall.
A Little Princess has a relatively small cast — a child, her father, the school's proprietress, two servants, and the man next door. The novel turns on the contrast between the characters who calculate Sara's worth by her father's bank balance and the characters who see her differently. Almost no one in the calculating camp changes their mind. The novel does not require them to.
Born in Bombay. Arrived at Miss Minchin's at seven. Dark, slight, with green-grey eyes. Reads in three languages, speaks French without an accent, tells stories that make the younger children forget the schoolroom. After her father's death at eleven she is moved to the attic and made to run errands. The novel is the record of the discipline she practices there — alone, in private, in the cold — and what follows from it.
A young widower of the Indian army. Devoted past sense to Sara. He and she speak to each other in the codes of a private game in which she is his Little Missus. He invests his fortune in a diamond-mine speculation on an old friend's advice, hears false news that it has failed, contracts brain fever in India, and dies. His absence is the structural fact the whole novel is built on.
A large doll Captain Crewe has commissioned — chosen by Sara from a Paris shop — as a companion during her time at Miss Minchin's. Sara decides that Emily's job is to listen. She tells Emily things she can't tell anyone else. After the fall, Emily sits in the attic with Sara and continues to serve this function without complaint.
Tall, dour, cold-mannered. Sara identifies her as a woman whose smile does not reach her eyes on first meeting. Her treatment of Sara is governed entirely by financial calculation: lavish during Captain Crewe's life, brutal after his death, and finally exposed in Carrisford's solicitor's chambers. Burnett does not make her a villain; she makes her a businesswoman in a system that rewards exactly this behavior.
Softer than her sister, more easily moved to ordinary kindness, and invariably overruled. She occasionally feels sorry for Sara and occasionally shows it, but has neither the courage nor the authority to act on the feeling. She is Miss Minchin's conscience, a conscience that has learned to be quiet.
Fourteen years old. Undersized, chapped hands, always cold, always hungry. She creeps into the schoolroom to listen to Sara's stories and is caught by Sara noticing her. After Sara's fall she becomes the closest thing Sara has to a companion — lodged in the attic next door, sharing the warmth of imagination if not the warmth of a fire. By the end of the book Carrisford's household has taken her in as Sara's companion.
A chubby, amiable girl with pale yellow hair, poor at French, and astonished by Sara from the first day. She is not clever, but she is loyal and genuinely fond. She makes secret pilgrimages to the attic after Sara's fall. She brings food hidden in her stocking. She is one of the few people at Miss Minchin's who treats Sara the same way before and after the money is gone.
Just four years old when Sara arrives. Loud, spoilt, given to fits of crying that only Sara can stop. Sara adopts her as a kind of little sister and calls herself her mamma. After Sara's fall, Lottie makes halting pilgrimages to the attic and does not fully understand what has happened. She is one of the few characters whose affection survives Sara's change in status because she is too young to perform the calculation.
Nearly thirteen. Was the school's natural leader until Sara arrived. Jealous of Sara during the good years, gleeful during the bad ones, and consistent in her unkindness throughout. She is the school's most efficient demonstration of how the same social logic that rewards Sara's father's money punishes Sara's father's absence from the world.
Tom Carrisford. Captain Crewe's old school friend. Pressed on him the diamond-mine speculation that he believed had ruined them both; it came in, after Crewe's death, beyond expectation. He has spent two years in broken health and conscience, searching for the missing Crewe daughter, not knowing she is running errands across the square every day. When he finds her, the restoration is both financial and moral — his own as much as Sara's.
Carrisford's lascar servant. He climbs across the rooftop slates to retrieve his master's escaped monkey, sees the bare attic, and tells his master about the child who sleeps in it. With Carrisford's blessing he and a young secretary transform the attic in a single night. He is the agent of the novel's most fairy-tale set piece, and Burnett gives him the dignity of genuine care rather than the condescension of picturesque exoticism.