She also wrote several novels for adults that were best sellers in their era. Burnett also wrote the popular children’s books Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), which was also adapted to the stage, and The Secret Garden (1911). She began writing as a teenager to help support her family. Both film versions significantly revise the novel’s plot.īurnett was English, but when she was three, her family emigrated to Tennessee due to difficult financial circumstances after her father’s death. The 1939 film adaptation, The Little Princess, starred Shirley Temple as Sara and is noted for being the child star’s first appearance “in Technicolor.” Director Alfonso Cuarón released his remake of the film, A Little Princess, in 1995, and changed the setting to World War I. In addition to being adapted for the stage, the novel has been the basis of two films. The novel is set in a boarding school in late Victorian England and reflects the era’s social structures-including the protagonist’s father’s role in colonizing India, the exploitation of diamond mines, and the social hierarchy rooted in the maintenance of a servant class-and typical literary devices such as a moralizing tone and the trope of the orphan who manages, through unlikely circumstances and after much suffering, to reach a happy ending. After the success of this play, Burnett’s publisher requested that she add those missing characters to her novella and expand it as a full-length novel, making the novel her third work involving Sara Crewe. Burnett explains in her preface to A Little Princess that when she wrote a play in 1902 based on her 1888 novella, she discovered characters such as Becky, Lottie, and Melchisedec, who had been left out in 1888 because the imaginary characters “did not mention themselves to me at first” (vi).

In this work, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), a celebrated Anglo-American novelist and playwright, expanded her earlier novella, Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's (1888), which had originally been serialized in St. The classic children’s novel A Little Princess Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Told for the First Time was published in 1905.

A little princess illustrated edition