Arrietty's Borrowers

Author's Name: Mary Norton

“People are good and bad, honest and cunning. Their natures change according to the situation. If animals could talk, they would say the same thing. Stay out of their way, that's what I've always been told. No matter what they promise you, no one has ever suffered better than Bushura.”

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The Borrowers was first published in 1952 and won the Carnegie Medal in the 1950s. Norton followed it with four sequels and a short story. The novel has been adapted into a film several times, but the most famous adaptation is the 2010 Studio Ghibli anime film The Secret World of Arrietty, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, inspired by her childhood outings in the countryside with her two brothers. These outings, she said, left her wondering at everything, just as much as they did her brothers, as she would stand and contemplate everything she saw. Or what she didn't see. Little Mary was short-sighted, which gave her a vivid imagination that made her see things differently! During one of these outings, it occurred to her to wonder about the nature of the lives of little people who inhabit houses and "borrow" what they need from their owners. “The world we knew had changed,” Norton wrote to a friend shortly before World War II in 1940. “The memory of borrowers came back to me from childhood. Men, women, and children were forced to live in abject, tragic poverty, the kind of life I imagined for young people. One realized—without any symbolism intended—that the world might produce people like Mrs. Driver who would not hesitate to harm others.”