A Little Princess Literary Elements

Children's Novel

London, England

Third-Person Omniscient

Gentle, encouraging

Protagonist: Sara Crewe. Antagonist: Miss Minchin

After the death of Sara Crewe's father and the supposed loss of her fortune, Miss Minchin mistreats Sara and attempts to drive her to despair.

The climax occurs when Mr. Carrisford realizes that Sara, the girl who lives next door to him, is in fact the orphan he has been seeking.

Sara's repeated fantasies of how she might behave, and how others might react, were she revealed to be a princess foreshadow her eventual inheritance of an enormous fortune and the restoration of her status.

When Ermengarde points out Sara's weight loss during the period in which Miss Minchin is starving her, Sara replies that she "has always been a thin child." This is an understatement, since Sara is no longer merely thin, but nearly emaciated.

Melchisedec, the name Sara gives to her rat companion, is taken from the book of Genesis in the bible.
Sara frequently fantasizes about Marie Antoinette and the Bastille. Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France, deposed during the French Revolution. The Bastille was the prison of the French old regime, stormed and destroyed during the revolution.

Rich visual imagery of Sara's clothing, toys, and rooms contrast dramatically with desolate imagery of her attic bedroom and ragged clothes after her father's death. After Ram Dass begins to leave Sara gifts, the novel begins to reincorporate lush images of luxurious decor and food.

The novel's apparent moral lesson is that truly good people, like Sara, can remain strong and steadfast even when deprived of material necessities, and will ultimately be rewarded. However, the book frequently equates upper-class behaviors with moral goodness.

Captain Crewe's friend Mr. Carrisford bears many parallels to Crewe himself, and these are revealed even before the reader knows of their relationship. He is an Englishman who has long lived in India, and he is suffering from a mixture of disease and psychological trauma rooted in disastrous business dealings.

Miss Minchin, when she discovers that Sara will leave her school to live with her new guardian, promises that "the law will intervene." This is an instance of metonymy: Miss Minchin is using "the law" to refer to the legal system and law enforcement as a whole.

Sara and the narrator both personify Melchisedec the rat and the various sparrows who live near Sara's attic.