ABSTRACT
In Sara Crewe, Or What Happened at Miss Minchin's? (1888), Frances Hodgson Burnett re-imagines the Cinderella story for children and adults who were still enchanted with her first ro mantic, rags-to-riches tale, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886). English and American audiences so enjoyed Sara Crewe and its theatrical adaptations that Burnett expanded it, and this longer version, A Little Princess (1905), remains popular today.1 Burnett modeled Sara Crewe on the fairy tales about princesses that were first widely read in the nineteenth century.2 In such tales, a wicked queen or stepmother figure punishes her rival and tries to pre vent her from assuming her royal station. Despite an enforced slumber that lasts one hundred years or a childhood spent sweeping cinders, the adolescent girl preserves her princess's soul and, in the end, she escapes to a castle with maid service. The torture or the trial the heroine endures often involves housekeeping. Cinderella sweeps her step family's fireplaces; Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle and falls asleep; the miller's daughter in "Rumpelstiltskin" must spin straw into gold or lose her life; and Snow White survives her stepmother's wrath by keeping house for seven dwarfs.
