An odd little girl with an “old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes” (3) rides in a cab with her father as they drive through the foggy London streets on a dark wintry day. Seven-year-old Sara Crewe recently traveled from Bombay, India, with her father to enroll in Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies in England. Sara’s mother died when she was born. Sara was raised in India by her young, handsome, light-hearted, rich father in a lovely bungalow where there were many servants who waited upon her. Only one problem troubled her there: her father told her that one day she would have to be sent to attend school in England because India’s climate was not healthy for children. Since Sara and her father adore each other, they are both deeply sad about their impending separation.

When Sara and her father arrive at the school, she finds it “respectable and well furnished, but everything in it was ugly; and the very armchairs seemed to have hard bones in them” (7). The square, heavy, stiff, hard house somehow resembles Miss Minchin. Sara does not like the house nor Miss Minchin, with her “large, cold, fishy eyes, and a large cold, fishy smile” (8), but she resolves to bear it like