Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy, A LittleĀ Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
Burnett in 1888
Burnett as a young woman
Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1901
Advertisement of Burnett's works
A Little Princess is a children's novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published as a book in 1905. It is an expanded version of the short story "Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's", which was serialized in St. Nicholas Magazine from December 1887, and published in book form in 1888. According to Burnett, after she composed the 1902 play A Little Un-fairy Princess based on that story, her publisher asked that she expand the story as a novel with "the things and people that had been left out before". The novel was published by Charles Scribner's Sons with illustrations by Ethel Franklin Betts and the full title A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Being Told for the First Time.
Front cover of the first edition (1905)
"She slowly advanced into the parlor, clutching her doll": Illustration from Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's (1888)
Millie James in the Broadway production of Burnett's play, The Little Princess (1903).
Shirley Temple as Sara in The Little Princess (1939)