Sara, a Princess: The Story of a Noble Girl

Fannie Ellsworth Stone NewberryProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.4
Word count
390K words
Chapters
39

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Boarding SchoolFamily BondsGirlhoodKindnessOvercoming AdversityYouthful VibeHeartwarming Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Sara, a Princess: The Story of a Noble Girl by Fannie E. NewberryAuthor: Newberry, Fannie E. (Fannie Ellsworth), 1848-1942,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Aug 1, 2004

Editor's review

This is a typical late nineteenth-century American coming-of-age novel for girls, centered on a girl of noble birth whose fortunes take a hard turn. Newberry excels at rendering her characters' inner lives with a gentle touch, weaving questions of fallen status, family misfortune, and personal character into a single narrative thread, so that readers feel how the heroine preserves her dignity and kindness amid hardship. The book's value lies not in thrills but in its moral seriousness and emotional warmth: it reflects what "nobility" meant in that era—not bloodline, but bearing and temperament. As a public-domain ebook, its prose is refined and its sentences long, making it suitable for extensive reading in English literature and for readers studying nineteenth-century American juvenile fiction and images of women. Readers might note the narrator's tone in evaluating female characters, which reveals the assumptions of the age.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read through the chapter titles first to grasp the plot's direction, then read chapter by chapter to reduce frustration from long sentences.
  2. Keep a notebook recording each change in the heroine's circumstances and how she responds, then review the clues to her character after finishing.
  3. Guess unfamiliar words from context first and look them up only after finishing a chapter, to keep reading fluid.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners to read directly? Not really. The original was published in the nineteenth century, with long sentences and fairly formal diction, so readers with weak English may give up midway. It is better suited to those with intermediate reading ability or above, or beginners can first read a simplified retelling to get familiar with the plot, then return to the original.
Is the main appeal of this book the plot or the characters? Character and moral portrayal are the core. The story centers on a girl of noble birth who meets with misfortune, and the focus is on how she preserves her kindness and dignity. Those expecting tense, exciting plot may find the pacing slow.
What should I keep in mind when reading a public-domain ebook edition? Public-domain ebooks usually preserve the original typesetting and wording and may lack modern annotations. When you encounter historical background or old-fashioned expressions, understand them from context rather than checking every word, so as not to interrupt the reading flow.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Fannie Ellsworth Stone Newberry Author · American · 1848–1942

Fannie Ellsworth Newberry (1848–1942) was an American writer of children's literature, born in Monroe, Michigan. She is known for stories of character and growth written for girls, and produced about twenty works over her lifetime, most of them published by religious and Sunday-school presses in Boston. Her representative books include Sara, a Princess: The Story of a Noble Girl; All Aboard: A Story for Girls; and Joyce's Investments: A Story for Girls, while The Wrestler of Philippi was her best-selling work. Three of her books are held in this collection. Her writing reflects its religious and Sunday-school publishing background, emphasizing moral formation and personal growth in a gentle style aimed at young female readers. Public information about the details of her life is limited.