A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett PDF Free

When the story opens, we see the mushy smushy interactions between a little girl named Sara Crewe and her father (let’s call him Papa Crewe), who are extremely sad about an imminent event. The imminent event happens to be the fact that Papa Crewe is shipping Sara off to boarding school in London (the cloudiest, most dreary of all places to be abandoned!) because she simply cannot stay with him in India. It’s not good for children because sun is worse than rain, and foreign countries turn good children into savages, or something. (In case you’re wondering: yes. This is racist. In fact, the whole book is a tad racist. We’ll get to that.) Sara arrives at Miss Minchin’s Seminary for Girls, which is a fancy boarding school run by a humorless old maid named (you guessed it!) Miss Minchin. Papa Crewe buys her lots of expensive clothes and toys, including a doll named Emily, and then jets off to India again. Miss Minchin treats her as a star pupil because she’s rich, but secretly she has a serious dislike of the little girl because she’s intelligent and independent—and Miss Minchin doesn’t like to feel threatened in any way. Sara makes friends with a not-too-bright girl named Ermengarde and takes a little girl named Lottie under her wing. She also befriends a scullery maid named Becky and wows everyone with her impressive grasp of the French language. So far, London is a success. On Sara’s eleventh birthday, Miss Minchin plans a huge party and Sara buys a giant doll that she ominously refers to as “the last doll.” However, as Sara is celebrating, Papa Crewe’s lawyer comes to the boarding school and gives Miss Minchin some unfortunate news—Papa Crewe has died. Penniless. With no money to pay the bills.