The only girl of her parents' five children, Norton was plagued by severe near-sightedness as a child. At the age of two, Norton moved with her family to a new home in Leighton Buzzard, a house that would help inspire her later books. Her father was a prominent surgeon who claimed distant ancestry to the famed author Edmund Spenser, creator of the epic poem, The Faerie Queene. Norton was born on December 10, 1903, in London, England, the daughter of Reginald Spenser Pearson and Mary Savile Hughes Pearson.

Intuitively told and conveyed with great respect for the child's point of view, 'The Borrowers' remains a classic series of children's fiction, reverberating with a fondness for a bygone era. The series traces their search for security, home, and family amidst the dangers of the human world, which offer constant threats for such small and fragile-albeit determined-beings. Consisting of five books- The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982)-as well as one additional short story composed over a thirty year period, 'The Borrowers' relate the story of the Clock family: father Pod, mother Homily, and their daughter Arrietty, the primary protagonist of the stories.

In addition to winning the 1952 Carnegie Medal for children's fiction, the first book of the series, The Borrowers (1952), was picked from among past Carnegie winners as one of the ten most important British children's novels of the past seventy years by the CILIP Carnegie Award panel. In England, where Norton's books are regular fixtures of juvenile literature, she remains one of the most critically praised children's authors despite her limited canon. INTRODUCTIONĪmong the most cherished works of British children's fiction, Mary Norton's 'Borrowers' series uses aspects of scale and narrative form to depict a fully three-dimensional family of diminutive beings that rely upon the human world for sustenance. For further information on the 'Borrowers' series, see CLR, Volume 6. The following entry presents commentary on Norton's 'Borrowers' series of juvenile novels (1952-1982) through 2003.

The borrowers 1952