Lisa's Reviews > A Little Princess

"Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."

Much can be said about the improbabilities in the plot, about the desperate sentimentality and caricature of Victorian England's boarding school system. It doesn't matter.

To me, Sarah Crewe will always remain a symbol for inner strength, perseverance and values winning over greed, sadism and abusive power. I can't recall how many times I read my hardcover copy as a young girl, shivering with anger and fear when the young heiress thinks she has lost everything and is turned into an unpaid maid at the school where she used to be a shining star.

Quite often, I think of her when I enter a bakery on a cold day, the smell of fresh bread making me instantly hungry. I think of the hungry girl, and how much she must have craved the buns she bought for a coin she found. And I know it is a simple show-effect on the part of Frances Hodgson Burnett to make Sarah hand over the buns to a starving girl sitting outside the bakery. It is not realistic! We are human beings. We a greedy, egotistical, trained and constructed to guarantee our own selfish survival first of all. We don't give away our bread. We hoard it until it gets moldy and can't be eaten by anyone!

And yet - Sarah Crewe, the fictional perfect human being, clever, kind, using her power to help, rather than to destroy others, makes my heart feel a tiny bit better each time I think of her. She is not realistic, and nor is the poetical justice in the novel, giving back the wealth she had thought she lost as some kind of divine reward for being a good sport when she lost it.

Does it really matter whether this story is exaggerated? If I can choose to give my children one of the countless bestselling young adult novels that show humanity in its worst egomania, or this tale of friendship, genuine care and power of imagination, I won't have to think twice. I like to imagine that people loving Sarah Crewe might start seeing those around themselves that are "hungrier than she was herself", and that they might feel that they can offer a bun or two from their bakery basket as a result of their reading. If reading inspires, I like to think this one inspires more than a dire account of teenage violence and crime...

Try being a princess no matter what - that's what I believe in, loving my fairy tales still!