A Little Princess

“Pack your dolls and a sweater We'll move to India forever”

Community readers across both platforms identify Burnett's A Little Princess behind the India fantasy, and the fit is close enough to do real work on the line. Sara Crewe is seven years old when the novel opens; India is the warm elsewhere she is removed from; and when her circumstances collapse she survives by telling stories to the other children in the house, several of whom are being treated badly. seven assembles the same three elements and puts them in a child's mouth - an age, a distant safe country, and a rescue offered in the form of a story. Read alongside the poem's other India reference, the fantasy stops being a generic gesture at faraway and becomes a specific inheritance: the destination a particular generation of children was given by a particular book.