A Little Princess
Front cover of the first US edition of A Little Princess (1905) | |
| Author | Frances Hodgson Burnett |
|---|---|
| Illustrator |
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| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's literature |
| Set in | London, Victorian era |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons (US) Frederick Warne & Co. (UK) |
Publication date | December 1887 – February 1888 (magazine) 29 February 1888 (novella) 30 September 1905 (novel) |
| Publication place | United States United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 75 (novella) 266 (novel) |
| LC Class |
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| Text | A Little Princess at Wikisource |
| Copyright: Public Domain (in most countries) | |
| A Little Un-fairy Princess | |
|---|---|
Playbill of the first US production (1903) | |
| Written by | Frances Hodgson Burnett |
| Date premiered | 20 December 1902 |
| Place premiered | Shaftesbury Theatre, London |
| Original language | English |
A Little Princess is a work by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, presented as a 1888 novella, a 1902 play and the 1905 eponymous children's novel. All three versions tell the story of Sara Crewe, a wealthy young girl who is initially welcomed as a privileged student at an exclusive girls’ boarding school and who, after losing her fortune, is forced to work there as a scullery maid.
The story was first published as the novella 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 this work, her publisher asked that she expand the story into a full-length novel with "the things and people that had been left out before". The novel was published by Charles Scribner's Sons (also publisher of St. Nicholas Magazine) 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.