Norton, Mary (1903–92), English writer of fantasy books for children and creator of the Borrowers, minuscule beings who live by ‘borrowing’ items that humans leave around. Her first book, The Magic Bed‐Knob, was published in New York in 1943 while she and her four children were living in America. Subtitled ‘How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons’, it shows the genteel Miss Price struggling to master the black arts, and a bed‐knob which through her spells will take a bed and its occupants on magic travels. The comic misadventures that follow were clearly inspired by E. Nesbit, as was the sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks, published in London in 1947. Here the bed is used to travel back to the past, where Miss Price eventually elects to stay. A combined version of the two, Bed‐Knob and Broomstick, appeared in 1957.
The Borrowers (1952) and the five subsequent books about them, can be read at different levels. Children are fascinated by a perspective of the world observed at six inches from the ground, and by the wealth of practical details; for adults it is a poignant parable of the struggle for survival of the stateless, displaced, and homeless. The three Borrowers, the parents Pod and Homily, and their daughter Arrietty (even their names are borrowed and have become transmuted in the process) are among the handful of their kind who have survived. They are not fairies, but miniature people; symbionts, dependent on humankind for all the essentials of existence. They search for stability and permanence and they echo the follies and delusions of the upper world. The last chapter of The Borrowers sees them driven out of the big old house where they have lived under the floorboards, and fleeing across the fields. The Borrowers Afield (1955) describes their Robinson Crusoe existence in the open air, enjoyed by Arrietty alone—she has always longed to escape from houses. In The Borrowers Afloat (1959) they are forced out of the gamekeeper's cottage where they have sheltered during the winter, and voyage downstream in an old kettle. The Borrowers Aloft (1961) sees them captured by rapacious humans who want to exhibit them. Imprisoned in an attic, they use all their borrower ingenuity to construct a balloon in which they can float out of the window. Offered a comfortable house in a model village by a sympathetic human with whom Arrietty—to her parents' horror—has fraternized, Pod insists that they must move on—humans can never be trusted. ‘“Where are we going to?” asked Homily, in a tone of blank bewilderment. How many times, she wondered now, had she heard herself ask this question?’ The Borrowers Avenged (1982) takes up the story for the last time; they are leaving this house with all its comforts in search of a new resting‐place away from human eyes. They find one, behind a grate in an old rectory, but we know, as do the Borrowers, that inevitably they will have to move on.
— Gillian Avery
