Here are Lottie and Lavinia, Ermengarde and all the rest, stepping back from the shadows and into the light. That could not have been the whole of it! Surely Lottie and Lavinia, Ermengarde and all the rest of that seething bunch of opinions did not just fade into the shadows! Did they not have a story too? What happened next? We were left behind, exactly where we were before she arrived. When Sara, the little princess, drove away with her mysterious benefactor and the scullery maid, the rest of us did not go with her. Hilary McKay, in her Author’s Note which prefaces Wishing for Tomorrow, her sequel to A Little Princess, writes of the one flaw in what seemed to her the perfect ending: Anne Shirley would say there was a meeting of kindred spirits. The former beggar, Anne, meets Sara’s eyes and takes her hand and somehow, the two girls understand each other.

Sara, once again a little princess, beloved, protected, given every luxury, scatters largess to the crowds: she takes her fellow scullery maid, Becky, with her when she goes to live with her guardian and she goes to a bakery where she had once met a starving beggar girl, to arrange for a better future for that waif with the kind-hearted baker woman. At the end of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, Sara Crewe leaves Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary, where she had begun as a cossetted pupil before being savagely stripped of her finery and forced to work as a scullery maid when her father’s fortune and life were lost.

Wishing for tomorrow by hilary mckay