Mary Norton

Mary Norton (10 December 1903 – 29 August 1992) was a British author whose creation of the Borrowers — a family of tiny people, no more than six inches tall, who live hidden in the walls and floors of human houses and survive by “borrowing” small objects that their hosts never miss — produced one of the most original and enduring works of children’s fantasy. The Borrowers (1952) won the Carnegie Medal, was followed by four sequels, and has been continuously in print for over seventy years. The concept is so perfectly conceived that it has entered the cultural vocabulary: the question “Have you ever wondered where small things disappear to?” is, for millions of readers, forever answered by the Clock family.

Early Life

Mary Norton was born Mary Pearson in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. She grew up in a Georgian manor house — the kind of old, creaking, many-roomed English country house that would provide the setting for The Borrowers. She studied at the Old Vic Theatre School in London and acted briefly with the Old Vic company before marrying Robert Norton, a shipping executive, in 1927. The couple lived in Portugal before the Second World War. During the war, Mary worked for the British Purchasing Commission in New York, and it was there, homesick for the English countryside, that she began writing children’s books.

The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947)

Norton’s first books were two short fantasies about a spinster, Miss Price, who is secretly studying witchcraft and enchants a bed-knob that enables three children to travel anywhere in the world — or in time — simply by twisting it. The books were combined as Bed-Knob and Broomstick (1957) and adapted into the 1971 Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, starring Angela Lansbury. The film’s success gave Norton a wider audience, though it bears little resemblance to the quiet, witty tone of the original books.

The Borrowers (1952)

The genius of The Borrowers lies in its premise. Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock live beneath the floorboards of an English country house, emerging only to “borrow” — a pin here, a thimble there, a postage stamp to hang on the wall as a painting. Their world is constructed entirely from human objects repurposed at miniature scale: cotton reels become tables, stamps become portraits, blotting paper becomes carpet. The ingenuity of these improvisations is one of the novel’s lasting pleasures.

The plot turns on Arrietty’s forbidden contact with a human boy — “the boy” — who discovers the Borrowers and begins leaving gifts for them. This contact leads to their discovery by the housekeeper Mrs. Driver, who attempts to exterminate them by calling in the rat-catcher. The Borrowers escape, but their world is destroyed.

The novel operates on multiple levels. For children, it is an adventure story about small people in danger. For adults, it is a parable about displacement, about the precariousness of any existence that depends on remaining invisible to those in power. Norton’s Borrowers are not cute — they are proud, anxious, status-conscious, and intensely aware that their survival depends on never being seen. Homily’s snobbery about the family’s relative social standing among the Borrower community is one of the novel’s sharpest comic pleasures.

The Sequels

The Borrowers Afield (1955) follows the Clock family after their escape from the house, living in the open countryside — an environment as terrifying to the Borrowers as a wilderness would be to humans. The Borrowers Afloat (1959) takes them down a river in a tin kettle. The Borrowers Aloft (1961) introduces a human villain, Mr. Platter, who captures them and puts them on display in a model village. The Borrowers Avenged (1982), published twenty-one years after the previous volume, brings the family to a new home in a rectory.

The sequels gradually lose the concentrated power of the original, but they maintain the quality of invention — the constant, detailed imagining of what the world would look like and feel like at one-twelfth human scale. The later books also darken in tone, as the Borrowers encounter human cruelty and exploitation alongside the earlier novel’s more benign indifference.

Narrative Technique

Norton uses an unusual framing device: the story of the Borrowers is told by an elderly woman, Mrs. May, to a young girl named Kate. Mrs. May heard it from the boy who discovered the Borrowers. This layering of testimony — the reader is always at a remove from the events, always hearing a story about a story — introduces an element of uncertainty. Are the Borrowers real? Is the boy’s account reliable? Norton never resolves this ambiguity, and it gives the novels a subtlety rare in children’s fiction.

Legacy and Adaptations

The Borrowers has been adapted multiple times: a 1973 BBC television serial, a 1992 BBC film, a 1997 American film starring John Goodman, and — most beautifully — Studio Ghibli’s Arrietty (2010), directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, which captures the novel’s atmosphere of wonder and precariousness with extraordinary visual delicacy.

Norton is often compared to other mid-century British children’s fantasists — Philippa Pearce (Tom’s Midnight Garden), Lucy M. Boston (The Children of Green Knowe), Penelope Farmer (Charlotte Sometimes) — who share her ability to ground fantasy in the physical textures of English domestic life. She belongs to a tradition of English children’s literature that finds the marvellous not in remote fantasy kingdoms but in the floorboards, attics, and gardens of ordinary houses.

Collecting Norton

The Borrowers (1952, J. M. Dent, London) in first edition with dust jacket illustrated by Diana Stanley brings $500–$1,500. The American first edition (Harcourt, Brace, 1953) illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush is more common. The sequels are less expensive. Bed-Knob and Broomstick (1957, Dent) is affordable. Norton is not as widely collected as C. S. Lewis or Roald Dahl, making her first editions relatively accessible for collectors of classic children’s literature.