Absolutely true about Lavinia -- in retrospect it's amazing how little I noticed it as a child!
One external explanation (I just remembered this*) is that A Little Princess is an expansion of an earlier novella (called "Sara Crewe, or What Happened At Miss Minchin's") where everything up to when Sara is 12 is just briefly summarized in the first few pages as set-up for the crisis, and the story only deals with the events after. If I remember correctly, the novella was popular enough that Burnett did a stage adaptation, for which she added more characters and backstory, and then she realized that she could expand the whole thing even more as a full-fledged novel. On the one hand, the fact that it was a play with all of the attendant conventions explains perhaps some of the time-fluidity/staticness. On the other hand, I suspect that the ages/personalities were originally envisioned to match the years after Sara's fall, and that Burnett was sloppy when she had to age those characters backwards.
A Little Princess does have a much longer timespan that the other Burnett children's novels (at least, those I've read): Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Lost Prince all take place over pretty well-defined, continuous periods of time.
*growing up, one of my sets of grandparents had about 20 years of bound volumes of St. Nicholas Magazine, which I read voraciously every summer. As a result, I was really up on my 1880's and '90's middle-class Anglo-American juvenile popular culture. They serialized several Burnett stories, and also regularly had articles about the stage adaptations.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-05-17 06:51 am (UTC)One external explanation (I just remembered this*) is that A Little Princess is an expansion of an earlier novella (called "Sara Crewe, or What Happened At Miss Minchin's") where everything up to when Sara is 12 is just briefly summarized in the first few pages as set-up for the crisis, and the story only deals with the events after. If I remember correctly, the novella was popular enough that Burnett did a stage adaptation, for which she added more characters and backstory, and then she realized that she could expand the whole thing even more as a full-fledged novel. On the one hand, the fact that it was a play with all of the attendant conventions explains perhaps some of the time-fluidity/staticness. On the other hand, I suspect that the ages/personalities were originally envisioned to match the years after Sara's fall, and that Burnett was sloppy when she had to age those characters backwards.
A Little Princess does have a much longer timespan that the other Burnett children's novels (at least, those I've read): Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Lost Prince all take place over pretty well-defined, continuous periods of time.
*growing up, one of my sets of grandparents had about 20 years of bound volumes of St. Nicholas Magazine, which I read voraciously every summer. As a result, I was really up on my 1880's and '90's middle-class Anglo-American juvenile popular culture. They serialized several Burnett stories, and also regularly had articles about the stage adaptations.