Mary Norton
born Dec. 10, 1903, London, Eng.
died Aug. 29, 1992, Hartland, Devon
British children’s writer most famous for her
series on the Borrowers, a resourceful race of
beings only 6 inches (15 cm) tall, who secretly
share houses with humans and “borrow” what they
need from them.
Norton was educated in a convent school in
London and trained as an actress with the Old
Vic Shakespeare company in London. She lived in
Portugal from 1927 until the outbreak of World
War II. While working for the British Purchasing
Commission in the United States (1940–43), she
published The Magic Bed-Knob; or, How to Become
a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1943) before
returning to London to write the sequel,
Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The two
stories, which concern the adventures of three
children and an amateur witch, were later
combined into a single volume, Bed-Knob and
Broomstick (1957; filmed as Bedknobs and
Broomsticks, 1971).
Norton’s most famous book, The Borrowers
(1952), featuring the tiny Clock family, earned
her a Carnegie Medal (a British award for
outstanding fiction for children) and quickly
became a children’s classic. The complete
miniature universe that Norton created earned
her comparison to such imaginative writers as
J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Lewis Carroll.
Four sequels, The Borrowers Afield (1955), The
Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft
(1961), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982), tell
of the Clock family’s continuing struggles to
survive after they have been chased out of their
home. The Borrowers tales were adapted for
television in the early 1970s and again in 1992
and filmed in 1997. Norton also wrote Are All
the Giants Dead? (1975), a humorous story about
aging fairy-tale characters.
Norton’s books were illustrated by Erik
Blegvad, Diana Stanley, and Pauline Baynes.
