Frances Hodgson Burnett

A Little Princess Annotated Frances Hodgson Burnett

When the story opens, we see the mushy smushy interactions between a little girl named Sara Crewe and her father (let's call him Papa Crewe), who are extremely sad about an imminent event. The imminent event happens to be the fact that Papa Crewe is shipping Sara off to boarding school in London (the cloudiest, most dreary of all places to be abandoned!) because she simply cannot stay with him in India. It's not good for children because sun is worse than rain, and foreign countries turn good children into savages, or something. Sara arrives at Miss Minchin's Seminary for Girls, which is a fancy boarding school run by a humorless old maid named (you guessed it!) Miss Minchin. Papa Crewe buys her lots of expensive clothes and toys, including a doll named Emily, and then jets off to India again.