A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Frances Hodgson Burnett

GENRE: Middle-grade Fiction, Classic.

PUBLICATION DATE: 1905.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A children’s classic about a young girl and her fortitude in times of adversity. Overly perfect main character, decent story (though a bit too straightforward.) Many inclusions that haven’t aged well at all. This was a reread after many decades, and it confirmed that my original feelings for the book haven’t changed; this can never be my favourite.

Plot Preview:

At the age of seven, Sara is sent by her wealthy and loving father, who is serving in India, to her new school in London. Dubbed ‘the little princess’ by her classmates for her fancy clothes and toys, Sara shows that her richness hasn’t spoilt her compassion and kindness towards those of lesser means. But when her father suddenly dies bankrupt, Sara’s circumstances change drastically.

The story comes to us in various characters’ third-person perspectives.

I had purchased this book from a book fair at school when I was about eight or so. I remember reading the book once and never returning to it. It somehow never created that big an impression on me, though I never understood why.

A few years ago, I heard a friend calling this her favourite book of all time. As I could recollect neither head nor tail of the story, I decided to give the book another go. I shouldn’t have. Child-me and Adult-me ended up with the same opinion at least as far as this book goes, but Adult-me is ready with reasons.

Bookish Yays:

💵 Sara’s being rich yet kind-hearted – a rarity in classic children’s fiction.

💵 The language – great vocabulary (when it is politically correct). No dumbing down of words for youngsters.

💵 The focus on the power of imagination coming through Sara’s storytelling and her play skills. Her version of Emily the doll’s life could very well have been the basis for Toy Story.

Bookish Okays:

💰 The story follows a standard ‘riches to rags to riches’ cycle. No surprises in any section.

💰 Sara as the lead. Fits the bill for a children’s book but she’s annoyingly perfect. I like realistic characters better. Further, the part when Sara aged ten tells a younger motherless child that she can be her mother left me bewildered.

💰 As in most classic children’s books, characters are either good or bad. There’s no layering. Most negative characters are shallow. Every good character worships Sara and every bad character hates her – that’s the one-liner summation of secondary character development.

💰 The story spans a fairly long time period wherein Sara goes from early tween to fourteen, but the passage of time isn't always clearly indicated.

💰 The friendship Sara shares with some pupils such as Ermengarde and with Becky the young maid feels good but also is patronising in some ways, which comes out through Sara’s thoughts. She became close only to those who were inferior in some way, though this wasn’t her conscious choice as far as I could tell.

💰 The overly smooth ending. Good for children’s fiction. Unbelievable for adult heads. Sara wants to help other poor kids but lets her “friend” Becky stay a maid, albeit a personal one. 😒

Bookish Nays:

💸 The glossing over of the harms of colonising and the stereotypical portrayal of India! I know the book is a product of its times and this content needs to be forgiven, but it is so, so difficult when the ignorant imperialist attitude is prevalent almost throughout the book. I had the same opinion about the Indian section of the author’s other popular favourite ‘The Secret Garden’, but at least in that book, the comments are left behind once the character is out of India. In this book, India features more prominently and hence the author’s white-saviour opinion comes out too strongly.

(What bugs me the most is that the author never visited India personally, forget about staying here. All her “knowledge” stems from what she imagined about the place. It is said that she wrote India as a contrast of the English countryside. 🙄)

💸 Yet another aspect that absolutely hasn’t aged well: the labelling of children as ugly or stupid or fat. Sara is supposedly an angel because she befriends kids despite their physical unattractiveness. In one scene, she almost tells Ermengarde, "It's not your fault that you are stupid". Oh my God!

💸 The lack of logic in multiple scenes. How can a girl make a hole in a penny coin without any tools? How can entire rooms be furnished through the roof without any noise and without the homeowner’s knowing?

Overall, I should have let this book stay in my past. But at least I didn’t waste much time on this 200 page novel. It has a few redeeming qualities, but on the whole, I don’t think I want today’s kids to read this book. Of course, as is more and more usual, mine is an outlier opinion. 🤷🏻‍♀️

2.5 stars. (If this were a contemporary middle-grade fiction, it would be 1.5 star material. I’ve given 1 star as grace marks for its being penned 120 years ago. No rounding up anywhere though; I am no angel-hearted Sara.)