REREAD: The Little Princess
Mar. 1st, 2020 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllA Little Princess: Frances Hodgson Burnett, Puffin 1073 reprint
Rereading February has been happening this year again (although I’m counting it as between 8 February and 8 March). This is the third book I’ve reread as part of that. I’d put it on the reread pile a while ago, although knowing there’s a new adaptation of ‘The Secret Garden’ arriving soon at cinemas made me more eager to reread it. I don’t know when I first read ‘A Little Princess’, possibly not as a child, and my expectations may have been coloured by my fondness for the other book, because I thought this would be a cosy reread of an old classic.
The central idea is vivid. Sara Crewe’s rich, widowed father brings her from India to London for her health and education. She is pampered and treated as a special pupil at Miss Minchin’s seminary, but is clever enough to see through it and know she is untested. Everyone says she is a queer little girl, some fondly, some not. When her father dies and his fortune is lost after investing in a friend’s diamond mine, the girl the school half-jokingly called Princess Sara is turned in a flash into a drudge, an errand girl, required to teach French to the youngest girl, study by herself when she can and skip meals if the cook or anyone else is in a mood. Forced to wear her old clothes that she’s fast outgowing, she almost looks like a beggar, but is clearly not. However, she has the gifts of imagination and friendship, and Miss Minchin cannot break Sara’s spirit. The lost fortune is restored to her by way of an enormous coincidence. Sara becomes a ‘princess’ again, and not just in imagination.
It's riches to rags to riches, and one can understand the appeal of the journey. It’s a fairy tale. But from the outset, I didn’t care for Sara as much as the writer wanted me to. She’s rich, but not spoiled, a born storyteller, so the author empathises with her, motherly, despite being motherless, unchildlike, despite always being referred to as a little girl. I much prefer cranky Mary of ‘The Secret Garden.’
I also can’t see this being published unabridged these days, somehow. The relationship between Sara and her father, who calls her ‘Little Missus’ feels a little off to modern sensibilities, and the sequence where two strange men, at the behest of another, enter her bedroom (a garret in an attic) without anyone’s knowledge or permission did not come off as charming. In fact, in Ram Dass, I saw a borderline stalker.
Yes, the book makes you think glad there was a Dr Barnardo and others who stepped in for hungry and maltreated children around the same time as this story is set, and glad too that society takes a greater interest in the orphaned and vulnerable child than leave them to the devices of the cruel Miss Minchin. (By the by, even before she essentially treats Sara as a slave, we’ve seen that she is an unimaginative, limited woman, which begs the question: why did Lady Meredith, whom Captain Crewe respected, recommend the school to him based on her daughters’ experience?)
There’s also snobbery at work. It’s not just her spirit, imagination and intelligence that set Sara apart. We are never asked to spare quite as much pity to uneducated, good-hearted scullery maid Becky, even though she too is clearly an orphan and at Miss Minchin’s ‘mercy’. Ram Dass seems born to serve and happy to do so. And I’m not even touching the colonialism, but I will say that every time the epithet ‘the Indian gentleman’ was used, I had to remind myself he was an Englishman who had been to India, and come back much enriched by it.
I was oddly reminded of Pixar movies at times. One of Sara’s pretendings is that her doll Emily is really alive and gets up to all kinds of things when no-one is around, but always quickly returns to her place so that she’s never caught – prefiguring Toy Story’s premise, although there are plenty of other stories about toys coming to life. Sara also befriends the rat who visits her attic (!!!), and we occasionally get his POV. His name is Melchisedec, and I couldn’t help thinking of Ratatouille.
But the coincidence that the friend who got Ralph Crewe into the diamond mine business, fatally, and who is to be forgiven for running when it all went wrong because he had a mental breakdown JUST HAPPENING to move in next door to the house where Sara is trapped, while his solicitor is looking for her on his behalf, was too much after what had come before. I was resolutely uncharmed by this story. I found no Magic at work in it.
Edited for typos 9/7/22.
Rereading February has been happening this year again (although I’m counting it as between 8 February and 8 March). This is the third book I’ve reread as part of that. I’d put it on the reread pile a while ago, although knowing there’s a new adaptation of ‘The Secret Garden’ arriving soon at cinemas made me more eager to reread it. I don’t know when I first read ‘A Little Princess’, possibly not as a child, and my expectations may have been coloured by my fondness for the other book, because I thought this would be a cosy reread of an old classic.
The central idea is vivid. Sara Crewe’s rich, widowed father brings her from India to London for her health and education. She is pampered and treated as a special pupil at Miss Minchin’s seminary, but is clever enough to see through it and know she is untested. Everyone says she is a queer little girl, some fondly, some not. When her father dies and his fortune is lost after investing in a friend’s diamond mine, the girl the school half-jokingly called Princess Sara is turned in a flash into a drudge, an errand girl, required to teach French to the youngest girl, study by herself when she can and skip meals if the cook or anyone else is in a mood. Forced to wear her old clothes that she’s fast outgowing, she almost looks like a beggar, but is clearly not. However, she has the gifts of imagination and friendship, and Miss Minchin cannot break Sara’s spirit. The lost fortune is restored to her by way of an enormous coincidence. Sara becomes a ‘princess’ again, and not just in imagination.
It's riches to rags to riches, and one can understand the appeal of the journey. It’s a fairy tale. But from the outset, I didn’t care for Sara as much as the writer wanted me to. She’s rich, but not spoiled, a born storyteller, so the author empathises with her, motherly, despite being motherless, unchildlike, despite always being referred to as a little girl. I much prefer cranky Mary of ‘The Secret Garden.’
I also can’t see this being published unabridged these days, somehow. The relationship between Sara and her father, who calls her ‘Little Missus’ feels a little off to modern sensibilities, and the sequence where two strange men, at the behest of another, enter her bedroom (a garret in an attic) without anyone’s knowledge or permission did not come off as charming. In fact, in Ram Dass, I saw a borderline stalker.
Yes, the book makes you think glad there was a Dr Barnardo and others who stepped in for hungry and maltreated children around the same time as this story is set, and glad too that society takes a greater interest in the orphaned and vulnerable child than leave them to the devices of the cruel Miss Minchin. (By the by, even before she essentially treats Sara as a slave, we’ve seen that she is an unimaginative, limited woman, which begs the question: why did Lady Meredith, whom Captain Crewe respected, recommend the school to him based on her daughters’ experience?)
There’s also snobbery at work. It’s not just her spirit, imagination and intelligence that set Sara apart. We are never asked to spare quite as much pity to uneducated, good-hearted scullery maid Becky, even though she too is clearly an orphan and at Miss Minchin’s ‘mercy’. Ram Dass seems born to serve and happy to do so. And I’m not even touching the colonialism, but I will say that every time the epithet ‘the Indian gentleman’ was used, I had to remind myself he was an Englishman who had been to India, and come back much enriched by it.
I was oddly reminded of Pixar movies at times. One of Sara’s pretendings is that her doll Emily is really alive and gets up to all kinds of things when no-one is around, but always quickly returns to her place so that she’s never caught – prefiguring Toy Story’s premise, although there are plenty of other stories about toys coming to life. Sara also befriends the rat who visits her attic (!!!), and we occasionally get his POV. His name is Melchisedec, and I couldn’t help thinking of Ratatouille.
But the coincidence that the friend who got Ralph Crewe into the diamond mine business, fatally, and who is to be forgiven for running when it all went wrong because he had a mental breakdown JUST HAPPENING to move in next door to the house where Sara is trapped, while his solicitor is looking for her on his behalf, was too much after what had come before. I was resolutely uncharmed by this story. I found no Magic at work in it.
Edited for typos 9/7/22.
