The Borrowers (novel)
The Borrowers won the Carnegie Medal in 1952, the same year Mary Norton published it through the London firm Dent. The award recognized it as the outstanding children's book by a British author that year. Norton's premise runs on a simple domestic logic. Small household items vanish from houses all the time, and no one can say where they go. Her answer is that tiny human-like creatures take them. These creatures are the Borrowers, who live hidden in the walls and floors of an old English country house near Leighton Buzzard.
A girl named Kate opens the novel crocheting a quilt with her elderly aunt Mrs May. Kate has noticed some of her crochet supplies have gone missing. Mrs May's explanation becomes the story of a Borrower family called the Clocks. Whether the Clocks were real is the question Norton leaves open from the first chapter to the last. She found enough to say about it to write four more books in the series.
Arrietty Clock owns a collection of pocket-sized books, and her ability to read sets her apart from any other Borrower she knows. Her mother Homily took pride in encouraging that education from an early age. The result is a Borrower who has absorbed enough to reach a conclusion the adults in her family have not. She is the only one among them, the novel says, educated enough to grasp that the Borrowers as a people may be dying out.
The Boy, who grew up in India and still struggles to read English fluently, tells Arrietty that India alone contains millions of people. For Arrietty, that number reframes her own situation. If the human world is that vast and she has no evidence of any other Borrower family, extinction becomes a real possibility. She writes a letter to her Uncle Hendreary, who emigrated to a badger sett two fields away. Her hope is to discover that her family is not alone.
Pod, a shoemaker who fashions button boots from beads and old kid gloves, is cautious by nature but open to new ideas. The novel describes him as a quick inventor and improviser. He is not the kind of father who stifles his daughter's curiosity outright. The Boy, who is ten years old, offers to carry Arrietty's letter to Hendreary himself. That offer forces Arrietty to decide how far she trusts a human.
The servants at Great-Aunt Sophy's house read the Boy's thoughtful, quiet manner as slyness. Their suspicion leaves him without allies in the house, which is partly why his friendship with Arrietty matters to both of them. The arrangement they reach is direct: he will bring her books if she reads to him. He can access books but struggles with them; she reads with ease and wants more material.
The Boy finds the Clock family's home beneath the floorboards and begins delivering gifts from the nursery upstairs, including dollhouse furniture. Norton describes the period that follows as "borrowing beyond all dreams of borrowing." Gift after gift arrives. In return, Arrietty is allowed to go outside and read to the Boy. Mrs Driver, the housekeeper, grows suspicious after she catches the Boy trying to open a curio cabinet full of valuable miniatures. She decides he has been stealing and hiding things.
Pod catches Arrietty taking a response letter from the Boy, a reply from Hendreary asking Aunt Lupy to come back. After Arrietty confesses how much she has told the Boy, Pod and Homily fear that emigration is now unavoidable. The candle that lights the Clocks' home from inside is visible through the floorboards above, and Mrs Driver is the one who notices it.
Mrs Driver locks the Boy in his room the moment she understands what is living beneath the floor. Her next step is to hire a rat catcher to fumigate the house. A former housemaid named Rosa Pickhatchet had left years before after catching sight of a Borrower. Driver's response is more purposeful: she intends to trap the Clocks inside.
Driver allows the Boy out of his room so he can watch when the Borrowers' bodies are found. He escapes and runs outside, breaking open the grating in hopes of giving the Clocks a way out. A cab arrives to take him back to India before he can know whether they made it. Driver forces him inside, and the novel leaves the fate of the Clocks entirely unresolved.
Mrs May, as a young woman, visits the house and leaves small gifts at the badger sett two fields away. The next time she checks, they are gone. Inside the house she finds a miniature memoranda book containing the entire story of the Borrowers, apparently written by Arrietty. Kate takes this as proof the Clocks survived. Mrs May points out that Arrietty's handwriting in the book is identical to her brother's. Norton leaves that ambiguity in place. Harcourt, Brace and Company brought the novel to American readers in 1953.
A. N. Wilson found in the novel's old, half-empty, decaying "Big House" a portrait of post-war Britain at a point of contraction. The Borrowers, on this reading, are a diminished people surviving on what a larger world no longer notices it is missing. The reading sits naturally alongside the novel without Norton ever insisting on it.
In 2007, on the 70th anniversary of the Carnegie Medal, The Borrowers was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works. A panel selected those titles to form the ballot for a public vote on the all-time favourite. That a novel written decades before could remain on such a list was a measure of how completely it had outlasted its moment.
Beth and Joe Krush provided the illustrations for the American edition. Woman's Day magazine also published the book in four installments, running from June through September, with illustrations by Erik Blegvad. Television and film producers would return to Norton's story repeatedly over the following decades.
A 1973 television film was the first screen adaptation of Norton's novel. Two decades passed before the next version. A two-part television series aired in 1992 and 1993 under the linked titles The Borrowers and The Return of the Borrowers.
A feature film followed in 1997. The 2010 animated film Arrietty used Norton's young Borrower's own name as its title. A second television film appeared in 2011. An animated series launched in 2025, the sixth adaptation in more than fifty years. In subsequent books of the series, an adult Mrs May inherits a cottage with a reputation for being home to more Borrowers.
Common questions
When did The Borrowers by Mary Norton win the Carnegie Medal?
The Borrowers won the Carnegie Medal in 1952, the year it was published by Dent in London. The award recognized it as the outstanding children's book by a British author that year. In 2007, on the 70th anniversary of the medal, it was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works of all time.
Who wrote The Borrowers and who first published it?
The Borrowers was written by the English author Mary Norton and published by Dent in 1952. Harcourt, Brace and Company published the American edition in 1953 with illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush. Woman's Day magazine also serialized it that summer across four installments, with illustrations by Erik Blegvad.
Who is Arrietty Clock in The Borrowers novel?
Arrietty Clock is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Pod and Homily Clock, a family of tiny people who live hidden beneath a grandfather clock in an old English house. She owns a collection of pocket-sized books and is the only Borrower in the novel educated enough to understand that the Borrowers as a people may be dying out. She befriends a human boy who brings her books in exchange for her reading aloud to him.
How do Borrower families get their surnames in The Borrowers?
Borrower families take their surnames from the part of the house they inhabit or once inhabited. The Clock family lives beneath a grandfather clock, the Rain-Pipes lived in a drainpipe, and the Harpsichords settled in the wainscot of a drawing room where a harpsichord once stood. The naming system maps an entire hidden social hierarchy onto the architecture of a single house.
What is the allegorical reading of The Borrowers by Mary Norton?
A. N. Wilson read The Borrowers as an allegory of post-war Britain, finding in its picture of a diminished people living in an old, half-empty, decaying house a portrait of a contracting empire. On this reading, the Borrowers survive by taking what a larger world no longer notices it is missing.
How many film and TV adaptations of The Borrowers have been made?
Six screen adaptations have been made: a television film in 1973, a two-part television series in 1992 and 1993 titled The Borrowers and The Return of the Borrowers, a feature film in 1997, the animated film Arrietty in 2010, a television film in 2011, and an animated series launched in 2025.
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