A Little Princess

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's London boarding school at seven years old, sent there by her father, Captain Crewe, while he serves in India. She's rich, treated like a favorite, and given the run of the place — until her eleventh birthday, when word arrives that her father has died of jungle fever and that the diamond mine investment he'd sunk everything into has failed.

Miss Minchin, out the money she was counting on, moves Sara up to a bare attic room and puts her to work as an unpaid servant, keeping only her doll Emily. Sara holds onto the idea that she can act like a princess regardless of what happens to her — the clearest scene is a freezing, starving night when she finds a coin, buys buns, and gives most of them to a beggar child hungrier than she is. She doesn't know that the wealthy, sickly gentleman who has just moved in next door, with his servant Ram Dass, is Mr. Carrisford, her father's former business partner, who has spent two years looking for her because the mine actually succeeded and the fortune is hers.

It's for readers who want the servant-to-riches shape without any cynicism about it. The honest reservation is that Sara's dignity, real as it is, doesn't actually change her circumstances — money coming back is what ends the story, not anything she does. And the well-known 1995 film changes the ending outright: it has her father survive the war, wounded but alive, which is not what happens in the book.