What might it be like, she wondered, for a very tiny person to see what to them would be an extremely giant and fearsome buzzard circling in the sky? These little creatures and their lives developed and formed themselves in the back of her imagination until she published The Borrowers in 1952. Young Mary wondered what it would be like to live as a tiny human among the small creatures that she saw there. a rapt investigator of shallow pools,” according to her obituary in The Independent. Central characters are Pod, Homily, and their teenage daughter Arrietty.Īs a very nearsighted child, Mary had been “an inveterate gazer into banks and hedgerows.
The little family “borrows” small items from their unknowing human hosts to set up their little homes in corners and under floorboards, where they enjoy mostly quiet lives, sometimes interrupted by adventure. They are only six inches tall and occupy nooks and crannies in a human house based on the manor where Norton grew up. The series follows the Clocks, a family of the Borrower race. Post-World War II, Mary Norton and her family moved back to England, where Bonfires and Broomsticks was published and where she wrote her most famous series, The Borrowers. This book, and its sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks, were very popular, and were eventually adapted into the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which was released in 1971 and won an Oscar for best special visual effects. At the same time, she worked for the British Purchasing Commission. It was published in England two years later and well-received in both markets. There she published her first novel, The Magic Bed-Knob Or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons, in 1943. When World War II began, Robert Norton joined the Navy, and Mary took their four children and moved to America. Wartime life and the launch of a writing career The couple had four children - two sons and two daughters. She and her husband moved to Portugal, close to his relatives, and lived there from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II twelve years later.
In 1925, in her early twenties, Mary became an actress with the Old Vic theatre company. Mary Norton (Decem– August 29, 1992) was a British children’s book author best known for The Borrowersseries.īorn Kathleen Mary Pearson in London, she grew up in a manor house in the town of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, England, and attended a convent school.
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