Who Is Mary Norton's The Borrowers?

The Borrowers by Mary Norton is a classic novel that does not get dated with time. “Marcus Crouch comments that, ‘of all the winners of the Carnegie Medal [awarded annually by the British Library Association to the best children's novel of the preceding year], it is the one book of unquestioned, timeless genius’” (Stott). The Borrowers was published in 1952 has continued to be read throughout the following years. This book is still in print and is still being read even sixty years after it was published. While the writing is somewhat old fashioned, the idea of having little people living under the floorboards of one’s house and borrowing things from “human beans” is intriguing. There are various adaptations of Mary Norton’s novel, The …show more content…
John Peterson wrote a book called The Littles, which is very like The Borrowers, and published in 1967. For example, in Peterson’s novel there are little people with mouse-like features who live “in a house owned by the Bigg family” (“The Littles”). The Littles are also the same size as the Borrowers are in Mary Norton’s book. The idea of the Littles was probably drawn from the scene in The Borrowers, when Mrs. Driver sees the Clocks and tells Crampfurl she saw “‘little people like with hands--or mice dressed up…’” (Norton 142). So this might have been where John Peterson drew his inspiration from when he wrote his novel The …show more content…
It is a piece of classic literature because the idea of little people living in one’s house and borrowing things from humans is not that implausible and it gives an explanation for why things go missing in your house and why things get misplaced. Also The Borrowers is still being widely read even sixty years after it was published. It is a fantasy because it feeds into a child’s imagination that there are other people living with us in our houses and that things go missing because the Borrowers have “borrowed” it. Norton’s own inspiration for this book came from her childhood in which she played with china dolls (Perrin). The Louisville Courier-Journal even says that The Borrowers is “A rare and delicious addition to children’s literature…. deserves to take its place on the shelf of undying classics” (Norton). The story is also a classic because it is unique in and of itself in how it is written and how the protagonist is a girl. It also shows the kind of relationship a boy and girl can have with each other even if they are different ages and different sizes. The enduring quality of The Borrowers and how it is still being read, adapted, and how the story itself is still popular shows that it deserves it’s place as a piece of classic juvenile fantasy