A Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett is my first book for Booking Mama's Shelf Discovery Challenge. The novel takes place in 19th Century London. Sarah Crewe is taken from her home in India to attend Miss Minchin's boarding school for girls. She is rich and her father showers her with every extravagance, until he dies and she is tossed into the attic to live with the scullery maid. Sarah never loses heart though, and still thinks of herself as a princess when she is wearing rags. She has a wild imagination which is tested by continuous hunger. When new neighbors move in she is fascinated by their Indian furniture and grows fond of watching them. Sarah adopts them as her friends even though she never speaks to them, but she finds out they are closer to her than she realized.
I had never read A Little Princess before, but I watched the 1995 version of the movie several times as a child. The movie changes a lot of things that I was a little surprised by, it really changed the meaning of the novel. I loved how in depth the book goes into what Sarah is thinking when Miss Minchin yells at her, even as an adult I wish that I could think the way she does.
When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward.
I was interested to read that the book was possibly inspired by Charlotte Bronte's unfinished novel Emma. Charlotte Bronte is my favorite author now so it was interesting to see yet again how my taste in childrens books are so similar to my taste in books now. My favorite part of the book was definitely the relationship between Sarah and the Indian lascar. It really captures the obsession with the Eastern mystique; everything he does is seen as magic. At the end you find out, of course, that it was not magic at all but that he was just sneaky. I felt like this really questioned the perception of India, almost in the vein of Virginia Woolf.
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