Mary Norton

Mary Norton (born Dec. 10, 1903, London, Eng.—died Aug. 29, 1992, Hartland, Devon) was a 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.

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Norton’s books were illustrated by Erik Blegvad, Diana Stanley, and Pauline Baynes.