Free to read
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe arrives at boarding school surrounded by comfort, then loses almost everything. With imagination and stubborn kindness, she tries to remain herself in a world that suddenly treats her very differently.
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Children / Family
- Length
- 19 chapters · About 6 hours
- First published
- 1905
- Availability
- Free
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Is this book for you?
For readers who like hopeful stories about friendship and resilience. A moving companion to The Secret Garden, with scenes of neglect as well as generosity.
Read it in English. This edition is free to add to your library.
Text source: Project Gutenberg. Source license and territorial terms.
THE OPENING PAGES
Try the first few lines.
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.
She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.
At this moment she was remembering the voyage she had just made from Bombay with her father, Captain Crewe. She was thinking of the big ship, of the Lascars passing silently to and fro on it, of the children playing about on the hot deck, and of some young…Start reading this book ↗