Short Story: The Light Princess

Summary

A whimsical but morally pointed fairy tale, "The Light Princess" traces the life of a royal child cursed to have no gravity, literally and emotionally. Because the queen refused to show ordinary grief when her husband drowned, a spiteful witch removes all weight from the newborn. The princess grows up to float about palaces and ballrooms, unable to feel sorrow or seriousness; she drifts from place to place, laughs at danger, and resists every attempt to make her conform to courtly expectations.
The arrival of a determined prince sets the action moving toward a decisive test. He falls in love with the airy princess and, to prove the depth of his devotion and to teach her the value of sacrifice, subjects himself to peril. When the prince appears to meet a fatal fate, the princess finally experiences real grief and at last sheds a tear. Her tears summon the lost gravity back to the world: she and the prince are brought to earth, the spell is broken, and the story closes on love redeemed and seriousness recovered.

Characters and plot beats

The title heroine is at once playful and tragic: she embodies lightness as a personality trait and as a physical condition, skipping responsibilities and drifting above the hardships of life. Her parents, the king and queen, illustrate affected dignity and emotional restraint; the queen's earlier refusal to mourn is the human failing that invites supernatural retribution. The antagonist is less a villain than a catalyst, the witch whose malediction exposes the family's inability to feel.
The prince who pursues the princess is notable for his combination of earnestness and cleverness. He refuses to coax her into sentimentality by teasing or mockery; instead he models courage and self-giving. His apparent death is the story's hinge: it forces the princess to confront loss and finally to cry. Those tears reverse the enchantment and produce a literal grounding that stands as a symbol of inner maturity. The tale resolves with marriage and the implication that emotional weight and moral responsibility have been reclaimed.

Themes and moral undertones

Gravity functions as an extended metaphor for emotional depth, moral seriousness, and human solidarity. MacDonald criticizes affectation and emotional numbness, suggesting that an inability to grieve or to bear sorrow detaches a person from reality and from others. Love, displayed as sacrifice rather than mere flirtation, becomes the transformative force that reintroduces weight to life. The story also interrogates parental failure and social performance: the queen's refusal to mourn proves contagious and costly, warning against affective posturing.
Beneath the surface playfulness lies a spiritual dimension. Redemption is achieved not through punishment alone but through reciprocal giving: the prince's willingness to risk everything evokes Christian motifs of self-sacrifice and atonement, while the princess's tears imply repentance and renewed empathy. MacDonald balances moral seriousness with fairy-tale justice, using enchantment to dramatize ethical growth.

Tone, imagery, and legacy

Witty, picturesque, and occasionally satirical, the narrative blends comic set pieces with moving emotional turns. MacDonald's prose delights in visual paradoxes, balloons of palace drapery, floating baby dolls, and the absurdities of a court that must invent contraptions to keep a princess on the floor, while shifting into intimate psychological realism at the story's climax. He treats fantasy as a vehicle for ethical instruction, and the tale's charm lies in its mixture of lighthearted invention and earnest moral concern.
"The Light Princess" endures as a celebrated Victorian fairy tale for its imaginative conceit and its insistence that maturity requires both feeling and sacrifice. Its blend of humor, allegory, and romantic rescue has influenced later writers of children's fantasy and remains a distinctive example of how moral lessons can be woven into the fabric of enchantment.