Fallen Princesses in Literature.
- The protagonist of Siobhan Parkinson's Amelia begins the story as a wealthy teenager, whose father runs a successful business. It goes bankrupt halfway through the book, forcing the family to move to a tiny inner-city house. Amelia's father starts drinking, her mother is imprisoned for suffragette activities (it's 1914) and her brother gets seriously ill. And of course Amelia gets looked down on by her former friends.
- In Patricia A. McKillip's The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Saro, after the magic renders her mute and dazed, ends up a Scullery Maid.
- The Ruritanian princess Elisaveta Arnsonira in the Chalet School series becomes a literal example of this during the war years. She and her children are forced to flee her home country of Belsornia because of Nazi activity, and she moves to England and works as a cleaner to support herself, while her father takes up farming. After the war, Belsornia becomes a republic and she changes her name to 'Mrs Helston' after her American mother-in-law. Like Sara Crewe, however, she is Spoiled Sweet rather than being a stuck-up snob.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses: Feyre the impoverished merchant's daughter. Unlike the rest of her family (especially her sisters) who spend their days moping or whining about their lost wealth, Feyre is accepting of the situation and focuses on trying to keep them all alive.
- In Sarah A. Hoyt's Darkship Thieves, Thena is the daughter and heiress of one of Earth's ruling Good Men. Then she has to flee his ship and ends up in a different culture.
- In The Dinosaur Lords, Princess Melodía goes from being Emperor's daughter to a fugitive on the run and gets an entire Break the Haughty subplot before reinventing herself as a Warrior Princess fighting for the people of Providence.
- Laurana in the Dragonlance novels is a Spoiled Sweet elven princess who was universally beloved until she runs away from home to try and win back her half human ex-boyfriend. She is then completely ostracized for disgracing her family. When she returns home she is snubbed by everyone, her brother cruelly mocks her romantic difficulties and her father publicly calls her a whore and ends up disinheriting her. She still goes on to become the Golden General.
- Dune: Princess Irulan Corrino is a borderline example, since she technically never leaves her position. However, she is an intelligent, diligent and beautiful woman, her father's designated heir and his most beloved child. Then her father chose to cross blades with House Atreides. By the end of the first book, Irulan is trapped in a political marriage with a man who openly despises her and literally will not speak to her unless necessity demands it, while showering favor on his concubine. Also, her husband has taken her father's throne, removed her from the line of succession, and only grants her the bare minimum of power (and, for that matter, personal agency) needed to maintain the fiction that house Corrino is still involved in ruling The Empire.
- In Earth's Children, Fralie's mother Crozie was once the headwoman of a camp and this, combined with her prestigious maternal ancestry, gave Fralie high social status in Mamutoi culture, which enabled Crozie to negotiate a betrothal between her and the son of another camp leader. Sadly, they lost it all when a fire destroyed their camp, also resulting in the death of all of Fralie's siblings. Her mate's camp took her in out of obligation but cast her and Crozie out after he died. Fralie was fortunate to have met Frebec and been able to move to the Lion Camp to at least have a roof over her head. She's far more accepting of this than her mother and just wishes to live in peace with her family (especially given her high-ranking first mate never loved her, while the lower-ranking Frebec adores her).
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honour Guard, Kolea tells Curth that in joining the Ghosts, she has become this, since the two of them were not of anything like equal status back home — she would never have known his name. She shrugs it off: she knows many people of his status now.
- In Hawksmaid, Matty has been raised to dance well, embroider exquisitely, and marry nobly. But when Matty's mother is murdered before her very eyes and her father, a nobleman, is reduced to poverty, Matty's life changes.
- Into the Bloodred Woods: Princess Ursula is driven out of her kingdom by her vicious brother and forced into the woods with a few dozen survivors.
- A basic example is A Little Princess when Sara feels like she's lost everything, ending when she remembers again that she is still a princess and is taken in by her Disappeared Dad's best friend.
- Wallace Wallace in Gordon Korman's No More Dead Dogs is a rare male example of this trope: he's a benchwarmer who accidentally scored the winning goal of the football final. The next year, he gets detention and can't play for the team. He ends up hanging out with the theater nerds and... you can figure out where it goes from there.
- In Andre Norton's Ordeal in Otherwhere, Charis Nordhalm was the beloved and well-educated daughter of a government official when a mysterious plague and religious fanaticism left her trying to flee a mob — who catch her and try to sell her to a Free Trader. She ends up signing the indefinite duration contract as her best choice. When she is recounting her story to Shann Lantee, he is shocked and surprised to hear of it; he clearly thought her position would be a result of a much lower social position.
- The Paper Bag Princess involves the castle being burned down, and Princess Elizabeth's dress being destroyed. She finds a large paper bag, and tricks the dragon into exhaustion. However, Prince Ronald was ungrateful for the rescue, not liking the peasant-like attire.
- In the Chivalric Romance Robert of Cisyle, the king makes the boast that when God humbles the proud and exalts the lowly, it doesn't mean him. An angel steals his clothing while he bathes, and takes his place, leaving him a beggar.
- In Thai Literature Sanonoi Reungham, Princess Sanonoi has to leave her kingdom when she is 15-years-old due to her bringing calamity to her people. She easily adapted to the life of a peasant girl and went through many hardships before finding happiness and marry Prince Wichitchinda.
- The Scholomance: One of the freshmen El found herself sharing a study period with at the start of The Last Graduate, a Thai girl named Sudarat, bore equipment and signs of training that marked her as an Enclaver who had been given years of preperation for The Scholomance with no concern for expense. While this is true, it is soon revealed that the Bangkok enclave was obliterated under unknown circumstances while Sudarat was taking her grandmother's dog out for a walk shortly before induction. An aunt who was working in Shanghai scraped together everything she could spare for her; but all the upperclassmen from Bangkok abandoned Sudarat in a scramble to look to themselves leaving her an un-affiliated (at best given how she is being actively avoided) 'loser' of no particular talent, no resources save what is in the book-bag she will risk her life to hang onto, and well below average chances of surviving the next four years.
- In Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen and its sequels, BZ Gundhalinu is a male example: coming from the upper level of an extremely hierarchical society, he's thrown into unfamiliar circumstances by bad luck, attempts suicide because of the dishonor of it, and then realizes that life is actually better outside his former world.
- A Song of Ice and Fire has several examples:
- Daenerys Targaryen is a fallen princess since birth. She was born during a rebellion to a family that ruled the Seven Kingdoms for centuries and lives in exile with her brother and several supporters. She starts discovering her butt-kicking powers towards the end of A Game of Thrones.
- Sansa Stark has a gradual fall from power. She starts out as the daughter of one of the most powerful lords in Westeros, is betrothed to the Crown Prince, and arrives at court as the future Queen. After war breaks out, she becomes a prisoner and suffers considerable abuse at the hands of her future in-laws; however, she still carries some status as a valuable hostage, being the sister of the newly crowned (rebel) King of the North and leader of the opposing army. After her brother is killed, his forces decimated, and she's fled the capital, she's forced to disguise herself as her Evil Mentor's bastard daughter and pretends to be an absolute bitch for her own safety. On the flipside, she has become a smarter, better person for it.
- Sansa's younger tomboyish sister Arya is a more traditional version, as she escapes being captured and disguises herself as a commoner. She experiences the horrors of war as one of the smallfolk, including joining the mass of refugees fleeing invading armies and being taken prisoner at Harrenhal. She also encounters multiple nobles without anyone realizing who she is. A slightly different case from Sansa, as Arya was something of an outcast among other noble girls even before her fall, felt insecure about being a lady, and was very friendly with the small folk from the beginning.
- Duke's daughter Angelica in Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs clearly expresses in her first meeting with Olivia that she expects commoners to be disgusting and rude, only to be surprised by Olivia's manners (since Leon arranged to have her taught). Angelica was also cold and strict, treating her fiance like a misbehaving child, due to his complete disregard for his responsibilities as a prince. Her downfall was challenging his lover to a duel, which revealed that her "followers" and vassals were FairWeatherFriends; and despite the duel being won by Leon, the engagement was broken, she was heartbroken, and her family's influence reduced. Thus, she Took a Level in Kindness and now gets along with a commoner and poor nobles who she would never have spoken to before while ignoring her followers who'd abandon her. The trope is played with in two ways:
- Angelica's pre-fall habits came back to bite her hard when a bully drives Olivia and her apart by bringing up the things she used to say about commoners, resulting in Angelica feeling immensely guilty, and Olivia feeling like she's nothing more than a pet in her eyes.
- Despite Angelica herself going through the transformation, her noble house still retains a good deal of power. In fact, Angelica's father acts as a sort of Psycho Supporter, crushing the noble households of those who cross her and her friends.
- Vorkosigan Saga: In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Tej falls from being a Jacksonian Baron's daughter to being a shopgirl, then then gets married to Ivan Vorpatril and rises again to be a cousin-in-law of an emperor.
- Princess Vivenna of Warbreaker. Leaves her country behind to rescue her little sister from an arranged marriage to someone everybody thinks is a Physical God Evil Overlord, falls in with a pair of mercenaries working against said Physical God who agree to help her only they turn out to be working for the real Big Bad and Vivenna has to run for it, at which point she spends several chapters as a beggar and amateur pickpocket before finally getting back on her feet with a little help from Vasher.
- Sadie McCall from Dear America is the daughter of a wealthy landlord in Dalhart, Texas during the 1930s and is the only rural family not affected by the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl, having money for new dresses and fashion magazines and a set and costumes for a School Play. She’s also an Alpha Bitch, picking on the other girls for their poverty, especially Helen Walker, who later leaves for California with her family. But a few months after Helen leaves, she discovers Sadie arriving at the labor camp with her mother and sisters. The family was deeply in debt to the bank and fled to California to start over. But then when they got there, Sadie’s father abandoned them. She struggles the rest of the book, leaving school to work, struggling to find work and getting head lice. But it results in her becoming humble and befriending Helen.
