The Borrowers

Summary

The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house. When Kate complains of losing a crochet hook, Mrs May begins to tell her about the borrowers, tiny people who live in the hidden places of old, quiet houses and take what they need from the human beings around them. Her younger brother, she says, saw them long ago, when he was sent home from India to recover from an illness and stayed at their Great-Aunt Sophy's old house in the country. In that house, under the kitchen floor near the grandfather clock, live the last borrowers of the place: Pod Clock, a careful, skilled borrower who makes shoes; his anxious, house-proud wife Homily; and their only child Arrietty, about fourteen, who has hardly ever been outside. Their home is furnished with borrowed things: postage-stamp pictures on the walls, cotton reels for stools, a matchbox chest of drawers, chess pieces and blotting paper. Other families who once lived in the house, such as the Overmantels and the Harpsichords, have gone, and Homily's relatives the Hendrearys left for a badger's set in the fields after their daughter Eggletina vanished, believed taken by the cat. The great rule of borrowers is never to be seen. One day Pod comes home shaken: he has been seen by the boy staying in the house. Fearing for the future, Pod and Homily tell Arrietty the history of the borrowers and agree to let her learn to borrow. On her first expedition outdoors she meets the Boy on the bank by the front door. They argue about whose world is bigger and which people serve the other, and she reads to him, since he reads slowly. She asks him to carry a letter to her uncle Hendreary in the badger's set, and he brings back a reply. The Boy then begins bringing presents through the floor, including furniture from an old doll's house in the night nursery, and the Clocks' home becomes grand. Meanwhile Great-Aunt Sophy, bedridden upstairs, sees Pod borrowing in her room and takes him for a vision brought on by her nightly decanter of Madeira. But the housekeeper, Mrs Driver, notices things going missing, discovers the borrowers' home, and sends for a rat-catcher to smoke them out, keeping the Boy locked in his room. The Boy escapes and breaks open a grating in the outside wall so the family can flee across the fields, but he leaves the house without seeing them go. Mrs May admits that she later went to the house and found a tiny notebook headed Memoranda, and Kate is left to decide whether the story is true. J. M. Dent published the novel in London in 1952 with illustrations by Diana Stanley, and it won the Carnegie Medal that year; Harcourt, Brace published it in New York in 1953 with pictures by Beth and Joe Krush.

Top Lessons

• Seeing the world from below

  Norton makes the familiar strange: a postage stamp becomes a portrait, a cotton reel a stool, a flight of stairs a mountain. Arrietty and the Boy each assume their own kind is the center of things, and their argument shows how much depends on where one stands.

• Borrowing and stealing

  The borrowers insist that they borrow rather than steal, since they believe human things exist for their use. The Boy questions this, and Mrs Driver plainly calls them thieves. The book lets children turn over a real question about ownership and need without settling it for them.

• Safety and freedom

  Homily wants the family hidden and safe; Arrietty longs for the sky and the grass outside the grating. The book honors both, showing that Arrietty's daring brings friendship and danger together and that her parents' caution has good reasons.

• A story we cannot check

  Everything in the book reaches Kate through Mrs May, who heard it from her brother. The ending leaves Kate, and the reader, to weigh the evidence of the little notebook and decide whether to believe.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical matters are incidental. The Boy has been sent home from India to convalesce from an illness, often identified as rheumatic fever, reflecting the period practice of sending sick children from tropical postings to recover in the English countryside. Great-Aunt Sophy, an elderly bedridden invalid, takes Pod for a hallucination brought on by her nightly Madeira and is unalarmed by him, a comic touch on drink and old age rather than a clinical portrait. Mrs Driver's attempt to smoke the borrowers out treats them as household vermin.

• Opening chapters (frame)

  Mrs May explains that her brother came from India to Great-Aunt Sophy's house to recover from an illness.

• Later chapters, Great-Aunt Sophy's bedroom

  The bedridden old lady sees Pod borrowing and attributes him to her decanter of Madeira.