Mary Norton (1903-1992)

Q. Who was Mary Norton

A. The British children's writer Mary Norton (n�e Pearson) was born in London and died at the age of 88 in Devon. She was educated in a convent school and trained as an actress with the Old Vic Shakespeare company in London in the early 1920s. She lived in Portugal from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II. Between 1940 and 1943 she worked for the British Purchasing Commission in the United States, and it was there, in 1943,that her first book, The Magic Bed-Knob: or How to Become a Witch In Ten Easy Lessons, was published.

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Q. And then

A. She returned to London in 1943 and wrote the sequel to The Magic Bed-Knob, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The two stories, which concerned the adventures of three children and an amateur witch, were later published as a single volume, Bed-Knob and Broomstick in 1957.

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Q. As in Bedknobs and Broomsticks

A. Indeed. The Disney classic, first released in 1971, was intended to be a follow-up to the massively successful Mary Poppins (1964). Despite featuring a couple of the same actors - David Tomlinson and Reginald Owen - and a similar use of live-action and cartoon sequences, it is not a patch on the earlier film, though it did win an Oscar for the special effects.

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Q. What else

A. Norton also wrote Are All the Giants Dead - a story about ageing fairy-tale characters - and The Bread and Butter Stories.

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Q. And The Borrowers

A. Norton's best-known work was her series on the Borrowers, a resourceful race of beings only 6 inches (15 cm) tall, who secretly share houses with humans and 'borrow' - NB, not steal - what they need from them. The first book in the series, The Borrowers (1952), introduced the tiny Clock family - so called because of the grandfather clock which concealed the entrance to their home - and it earned her a Carnegie Medal. Almost immediately it became a children's classic, and the complete miniature universe that she created gave rise to comparisons with writers as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll.

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Four sequels, The Borrowers Afield (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961) and The Borrowers Avenged (1982), tell of the Clock family's continuing struggles to survive after they have been chased out of their home. Many British children were first introduced to the family in the television adaptations in the early 1970s and redone in 1992.

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See also the article on Andrew Carnegie

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By Simon Smith