A Little Princess — themes & analysis

Sara's most important intellectual move happens in the attic, not in the schoolroom. She tells Becky, huddling under their coverlets in the cold, that the only way to endure a miserable body is to make your mind think of something else. Then she adds, with characteristic precision: sometimes I can and sometimes I can't, but when I can, I'm all right. This is not cheerfulness. It is an honest account of a practice that sometimes fails and is worth doing anyway.

The practice she has developed is the Bastille game. She does not pretend the attic is warm or that she is not hungry. She pretends the attic is a prison cell in revolutionary Paris, that she is a prisoner of conscience, that Becky in the next room is the prisoner in the adjacent cell, and that the rats are companions worth naming and feeding. The fiction she chooses is not one that contradicts her circumstances; it is one that fits her circumstances and gives her a role inside them she can perform with dignity. The cold remains cold. The hunger remains hunger. What changes is that she is no longer merely the object of these things.

Burnett is doing something her century understood and ours has half-forgotten — making a serious case that what the mind tells itself about what is happening to the body is not nothing. The inner life of a child is not a decoration on the real life but a constituent part of it. When Sara tells Ermengarde that pretending is a discipline rather than an escape, she is describing a mental habit that requires effort and fails occasionally and is nonetheless worth practicing. The argument is delivered in the voice of an eleven-year-old explaining it to a scullery maid. Burnett trusts the form. She is right to.

The novel's most counterintuitive claim is that this inward discipline is what produces outward generosity. The bread scene in Chapter 13 is the proof. Sara can see the beggar girl because she has been practicing, in the attic, the art of directing her attention rather than being overwhelmed by it. The discipline of imagination is not self-absorption; it is the training that makes it possible to see someone else at the moment of one's own greatest deprivation.

Where to follow it: Chapter 5 (the storytelling power), Chapter 8 (first night in the attic), Chapter 13 (the Bastille game and the bread scene), Chapter 16 (the magic revealed).

The famous passage comes when Sara is wet through from running errands in the rain, has not eaten since the morning, and is climbing the attic stairs with shoes that have stopped keeping the water out. She tells herself that the real test of whether she has any of the things she once had is whether she can keep them when she is in this state. The test is not about behavior in easy circumstances. It is about behavior in impossible ones.

The test is moral and not metaphorical, and the novel insists on this by making Sara fail it occasionally. She is sharp with Becky once. She lashes out at Lavinia. Burnett does not make her a saint; she makes her a child trying, with intermittent success, to live up to a standard she has chosen for herself in private. The choice to make the standard self-imposed rather than imposed from outside is the novel's most adult move. Sara is not being good for Miss Minchin. Miss Minchin would not notice. She is being good because she has decided that this is who she is going to be, and because the only thing left to her after her father's death is the question of whether her account of herself was true.

What makes the test serious is that it could be failed without anyone knowing. No one in the school is grading Sara on kindness to Becky or patience with Lottie. Miss Minchin sees only the errand girl. Lavinia sees only a rival to be tormented. The test is entirely private — between Sara and herself — which is exactly why passing it matters. A princess performed for an audience is not a princess in Burnett's sense. A princess is what you are when no one is watching, in the dark, on the wet stairs, before the fire is lit.

The novel does not sentimentalize this. The test produces no visible reward in the middle chapters. Sara is still cold, still hungry, still sent out in the rain. The reward the book eventually offers — the restoration, the recognition, the discovery of Mr. Carrisford — is deliberately withheld until the reader has understood that Sara was not waiting for it. She was not practicing the princess test as a strategy for getting rescued. She was practicing it because it was the only thing she still owned.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (the test introduced, before the fall), Chapter 8 (the test begins in earnest), Chapter 9 (Lottie, and the question of kindness), Chapter 13 (the test under maximum pressure).

When Captain Crewe arrives with money, Sara is the showpiece pupil — installed in the parlour boarder's quarters, dressed in velvet and sables, given her own French maid and her own carriage. The school's ledgers and its public face require a star, and Sara is the star. When the news of Captain Crewe's death arrives along with the news that the speculation has bankrupted the estate, Miss Minchin's calculation reverses with the same cold rationality. Sara is now a debt; the choice is to turn the child out into the street or to keep her and recoup the cost in unpaid labor. Miss Minchin chooses the second, and the choice is, on its own terms, prudent.

What the novel exposes is not Miss Minchin's wickedness but the structural cruelty of a system in which a child's worth is exactly the size of her father's bank balance. The same person who kissed Sara on the forehead an hour ago can, an hour later, demote her to scullery work without inconsistency. The observation extends throughout the school. Lavinia, who was Sara's most jealous rival in prosperity, turns gleeful tormentor in adversity. The smaller girls who clung to Sara when she was rich fall away when association with her becomes risky. Miss Minchin's sister Amelia, weaker and more easily moved to ordinary kindness, is intermittently her conscience and is invariably overruled.

Burnett has spent her own years in genteel poverty — her father died young; the family emigrated to avoid destitution — and she knows exactly how this works. She knows that the polite world's treatment of children whose fathers have died at the wrong time is not cruel in any theatrical sense; it is simply rational, by the logic of the world she is describing. The novel does not sentimentalize the alternative. It simply shows us, in contrast, a child who has developed a different logic — the princess test — which operates entirely outside the economy of reputation and bank balances.

The reversal at the end is satisfying precisely because it is structural rather than magical. Carrisford's solicitor does not rescue Sara by appealing to Miss Minchin's better nature. He rescues her by making it clear that the calculations Miss Minchin made were monstrous — and expensive. Miss Minchin, who has spent a hundred pages exploiting Sara's destitution, finds herself, in three sentences, on the wrong side of the ledger. The novel does not punish her further than that. The exposure, in this book, is the punishment.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (Miss Minchin's first calculation), Chapter 2 (Lavinia and the school hierarchy), Chapter 7 (the calculation reverses), Chapter 18 (the reckoning).

Sara has been sent on a long errand in cold rain. She has not eaten. She finds a fourpenny piece in the gutter — an event she recognizes, without irony, as magical. She stops at a baker's window and spends it on six buns. As she steps out of the bakery she sees a child crouched on the wet doorstep, in worse clothes, hungrier, younger. The decision Sara makes takes about two seconds and one paragraph. She gives the beggar girl five of the six buns.

Burnett writes the scene with no rhetorical flourish. The beggar girl is not transformed by the gift; she is still hungry, just less so. Sara is not transformed by the gift; she goes home to the attic colder than before. The baker's wife, watching from inside, takes note — but Sara does not know that, and does not give for the sake of being noticed. The whole machinery of the book's eventual resolution is set in motion not by magic and not by the discovery that Sara is rich after all, but by a single act of attention to someone hungrier than herself at a moment when she had nothing to give but bread.

The scene is the answer to anyone who reads A Little Princess as a self-help book about positive thinking. What Sara has been practising in the attic, with her stories and her rats and her Bastille game, is the discipline that lets her see the beggar girl when a less prepared child would have walked past. The imagination Sara exercises in private is not self-absorption; it is the training that makes it possible to direct attention outward, under the maximum pressure of one's own distress.

Burnett returns to the bread scene at the end of the book, through the baker's wife's report and through the restoration that follows from it. The fairy-tale machinery of the ending — Carrisford, Ram Dass, the diamond mines — is not magic imposed on the story from outside. It is the world noticing, at last, the thing Sara had been doing when no one was looking. The bread scene is the novel's argument, compressed into a single moment. Everything before it is preparation; everything after it is consequence.

Where to follow it: Chapter 10 (the Indian gentleman and the large family), Chapter 13 (the bread scene), Chapter 19 (the story retold).

Mr. Carrisford — Tom Carrisford, Captain Crewe's old school friend, the man who pressed on him the diamond-mine speculation — moves into the house next door to Miss Minchin's. He is broken in health and conscience. He has been searching for two years for the missing Crewe daughter, the rightful heiress of a fortune that came in spectacularly late, after Crewe had already died of the false news that it had failed. He never realizes, through the long middle of the book, that the underfed servant girl running errands across the square is the child he has been looking for.

Ram Dass, Carrisford's Indian servant, sees the attic first. He climbs across the slates to retrieve his master's escaped monkey and finds Sara's room — bare boards, no fire, a cracked basin. He reports it to Carrisford and proposes something simple: he could cross the slates at night, when she is out, and leave a fire and a meal. From this small gesture grows the elaborate transformation of the attic — the thick rug, the cushions, the warm food, the books — that fills Chapter 15. The magic is real, but it has an agent and a motive, and both are human.

The recognition, when it finally comes, is written with deliberate restraint. Carrisford has been told the search has failed. He sees Sara in the street, struck by something familiar. She comes to his house to return the monkey. They speak. He realizes who she is. Miss Minchin arrives to take her back. Carrisford's solicitor explains the situation in three sentences, and Miss Minchin finds herself on the wrong side of the law and the ledger simultaneously.

The novel does not give Sara back her father, who is genuinely dead. It does not undo the year in the attic. What it gives her is a man of conscience who has been doing his moral work all along — searching, spending, refusing to stop — and the material means to live the rest of her life on her own terms. The fairy tale, in Burnett's hands, is not a contradiction of the realism; it is the realism's reward to the kind of child who deserved the recognition before she received it.

Where to follow it: Chapter 12 (the Indian gentleman introduced), Chapter 14 (Ram Dass enters the attic), Chapter 15 (the magic transformation), Chapter 17 (the search and the recognition).