The Little Princess Study Guide

The Syllabus Series, Week Three

About the Syllabus Series

Welcome to the third installment of the Syllabus Series! Over the next few weeks, we’re taking a deep dive into Classic Children’s Literature. If you want to know about the Syllabus Series click here. You can find the first lesson here and the second lesson here. The Syllabus Series is for paid subscribers and includes perks like downloadable reading lists and writing prompts to take your reading to the next level.

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Surviving Summer with A Little Princess

When I think of A Little Princess, I think of the movie, not the book. I’ve read the iconic book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but it is the movie that I carry inside me.

The summers of my daughter’s childhood holds treasured memories for me because it was a time when I could relive my own happy and carefree childhood days, under the guise of being a mom. I would pick her up from school on that last day, and our long, lazy days would begin.

I worked as a freelance craft designer in those days, producing projects for craft supply manufacturers to use for marketing but I always made time each day to have an adventure with my daughter. Mondays were library days, Wednesdays we would go to the pool, Fridays we would go grocery shopping and pick-up movies (remember Hollywood Video?) for our family movie and pizza night. Sometimes, on those trips to the video store, I would find a movie or two for us to watch on a hot afternoon.

Living in Southern California, summer afternoons were brutal. The sun would beat down, the mercury would rise, and the air would clog with a thick layer of ozone that made our chests so tight that yawning was impossible as we couldn’t inhale fully.

It was on these blistering afternoons that my daughter and I would come home from our adventures, overheated and cranky. My daughter exhausted from playing, her soft, fine baby hair, sticking to her forehead, her cheeks flushed pink. Both of our nerves raw from the commotion of a library story time or a morning spent at the pool.

I would turn the air conditioning up and draw the curtains and we would sink into our little cave to watch movies. We treated the heat of the day like some people treat snowstorms-as times to hibernate.

I was always eager to show her movies that were children’s movies, but not the ridiculous slop that was on offer for children in the early 2000s. (Has it gotten better?) Instead, I chose movies that were based on beloved children’s books.

I wish I could say I chose those movies because I was a good mother who wanted to educate her child, but honestly I just couldn’t sit through another Barbie movie, so I picked movies that both of us would enjoy. Movies like A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Because of Winn Dixie, and Charlotte’s Web and Nanny Mcphee.

By the time the movie was over, we were cooler, both physically and temperamentally. My daughter would go off to play or make art while I made dinner.

My daughter, now a young woman, is coming home from college this week and I can’t help but feel nostalgic for those summer days. We will both be working over the summer, and she will spend days at the pool with her friends, but I know there will also be hot afternoons, when we close the drapes, turn the air conditioner to high, and watch a movie together. I cannot wait.

Syllabus Series Writing Prompts & Study Guide: