A Little Princess Literary Long Sleeve

Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (1905) — and by the exact moment Sara Crewe decides who she is going to be. Her father is dead, her money gone, and she has just been told she will be a servant in the school where she was the star pupil. She stands still for a few minutes, thinking. Then she lifts her head: "Whatever comes, cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."

The design features Sara sitting on the bare floor of her cold attic wrapped in a red shawl, worn boots beneath her, a stub of candle at her side and a sparrow at the window, with a crown of stars glimmering above her head as she looks up.

Burnett knew the drop herself; her family lost everything when she was a girl, and she wrote her way out of it. What she gave Sara is not a rescue but a decision — that dignity is something you keep rather than something you're given, and that being one when no one knows it is the harder, better trick.