48 pages • 1 hour read
Mary NortonThe Borrowers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The Borrowers opens as a young girl named Kate sits with Mrs. May, a woman who rents a room in Kate’s parents’ house in London. Kate is described as a wild and fearless child, and Mrs. May is a no-nonsense older woman with an air of confidence. Mrs. May teaches Kate many traditional homemaking tasks, from how to organize a drawer to how to properly wind a ball of yarn. She is also teaching Kate how to crochet. One afternoon, Kate mentions that she cannot find her crochet hook, which she left on a lower shelf near her bed the night before. Mrs. May looks alarmed and begins to tell Kate about the Borrowers, tiny people who live in the house and take things from humans. At first, Kate doesn’t believe her, but when she begins to think about how small objects often go missing and how she cannot find things like safety pins and blotting paper when she needs them, Mrs. May’s story takes on more credence.
Mrs. May insists that although she has never seen a Borrower herself, her brother did. She and her brother had been raised in India, but he was sent to live in a big old family home in the British countryside for a few months after coming down with rheumatic fever. He lived there with his Great Aunt Sophy, who was elderly and bedridden, as well as a cook named Mrs. Driver and a gardener named Crampfurl. He was often alone and spent much of his time in bed recovering from his illness. After he left the country home, he told his sisters the story of how he spotted and ultimately befriended the Borrowers.
Chapter 2 Summary
The entrance to the Clock family’s home is a hole under a huge grandfather clock in the country house’s main hall. Beyond this hole, a long passageway leads to a series of rooms under the kitchen, where teenage Arrietty, her father Pod, and her mother Homily live in secret, surviving on supplies and household goods that they have “borrowed” from the human family over the years. In addition to the rooms themselves, Pod has also built a number of gates within the passage, which serve as a defense against mice.
When the story begins, the family lives a comfortable but boring life. Pod regularly leaves the home to borrow from the main rooms of the house, but Homily and Arrietty stay safely in their hidden home. When Mrs. May’s story begins, Pod is out borrowing and Homily and Arrietty are preparing dinner. Arrietty feels lonely and frustrated and longs to go out to the world of the “human beans” or at least to get a mouse for a pet. Homily scolds her daughter for such wishful thinking and alludes to a tragic event that happened years before, in which Arrietty’s cousin Eggletina met a sad fate thanks to her own curiosity about exploring outside. Unlike Arrietty, Homily is satisfied to stay in the hole, tending to the beautiful house that she has created from Pod’s finds.
Chapter 3 Summary
As dinnertime approaches, Hominy becomes concerned that Pod has not yet returned from borrowing. (He went out at her request to find a dollhouse teacup to replace one that Arrietty broke.) Homily knows that getting to the teacups will require Pod to climb up a curtain, something that he finds more difficult to do as he ages. Homily feels ashamed of herself, imagining all the terrible things that could have happened to Pod in pursuit of something that is not critical for their survival. She thinks about her own family, who shared a bone thimble for a teacup, and wonders how she got to be so materialistic.
Arrietty mentions that she could help with the borrowing since she is young and more agile than her father. Homily is shocked by this suggestion and tells Arrietty that the outside world is dangerous and that, according to a longstanding Borrower tradition, girls never go borrowing. Arrietty asks her mother what the upstairs world is really like, and just as Homily begins to share a story about Pod’s brother Hendreary, Eggletina’s father, a sound outside the house heralds Pod’s return. Homily scrambles to comb her hair, wanting to look neat and tidy for her husband.
Chapter 4 Summary
Pod looks tired and withdrawn as he enters the room, dragging his heavy borrowing sack along with the doll’s teacup and a tiny saucer. Homily can tell that something is wrong and persuades Arrietty to go to bed before she speaks to Pod. Arrietty obeys but cannot sleep, so she strains her ears through the thin walls of her cigar-box bedroom, trying to hear what her parents are talking about.
Meanwhile, Pod solemnly explains to Homily that he has been seen by a human. Homily is horrified; no Borrower has been seen since Uncle Hendreary was spotted by a human 45 years earlier, and that event spurred Hendreary’s family to leave the house and “emigrate” to a badger den. Homily does not want to move, for she is accustomed to the comforts of indoor life and cannot imagine Arrietty growing up “wild” like Hendreary’s five boys.
The person who saw Pod was only a young boy whom the Clock family had not previously noticed living in the house. He did not harm Pod, but instead, he calmly approached the frightened Borrower and took the cup from Pod’s hand so that he could climb down the curtain more easily. Once Pod was on the ground, he gave the cup back. Despite this gentle treatment, the Clock parents worry that being seen by a human will mean that the same thing will happen as after Hendreary was seen; they fear that the family will get a cat. They agree that they must educate Arrietty about the human world so that she will not venture out on her own and meet a grisly fate.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The opening chapters of The Borrowers introduce the Clock family, their home under the kitchen, and the larger human home in which they live. The story is introduced by way of a frame story, or a story within a story. This additional narrative layer speaks to the tension of Imagination Versus Reality and adds quite a few nuances to the overall interpretation of the novel, for although Mrs. May relates the Borrowers’ story to Kate as though it is real, Norton creates a deliberate element of uncertainty here, for Mrs. May mentions that the story comes from her younger brother, who often teased his sisters and whose time in India rendered him prone to believing in the supernatural. Additional narrative unreliability can be found in the fact that Mrs. May is relating a story from her distant childhood memories; however, despite such uncertainties, Mrs. May’s ability to recount a detailed picture of the Clock family’s life, names, home, and backstory implies that the tale is indeed true, thus lending a sense of the fantastic to such ordinary human occurrences as the unexpected loss of a crochet hook. By creating such a novel explanation for the disappearance of common household items, Norton implies, by extension, that Borrowers must live in many places around the world and that any recent disappearances of this nature in readers’ own lives may indeed be attributed to the secret presence of such “little folk” in their own homes.
Chapter 1 firmly establishes the “present-day” reality of Mrs. May and Kate before Chapter 2 can effectively launch the story within a story that focuses entirely on the adventures of the Clock family about 20 years earlier, when Mrs. May’s brother was living at an old country house in England to recover from rheumatic fever. From Chapter 2 onward, Mrs. May and Kate disappear from the narrative completely until the very end of the book, and the story of the Borrowers is presented by a matter-of-fact, detached style of narration that further implies that the story is nothing less than a true account of actual events.
In Norton’s efficient characterizations, the Clock family is presented as being both resilient and resourceful; they are the last remaining Borrower family in a house that used to hold dozens of Borrowers. In a further strengthening of this theme, the main character, 13-year-old Arrietty, proves herself to be even more adventurous than her parents, for her desire to experience life beyond the home reflects an enduring drive to seek a life of variety rather than being content with the status quo, regardless of the advice of her elders. Her initiation into the skills of borrowing thus represents something of a coming-of-age tale within the larger story, for with her first expedition into the wider house beyond the floorboard home, Arrietty joins a long tradition of Borrowers who shoulder the burden of risking unknown dangers in support of their family’s well-being and survival.
Pod and Homily’s roles in the family also largely parallel those of the traditional gender roles in the early 20th-century human world. Pod is presented as a hard-working man who can build almost anything and who fearlessly ventures into the human world to borrow supplies, even as his aging body renders such labor more and more hazardous and difficult. Homily, meanwhile, is primarily a homemaker who is almost stereotypically obsessed with keeping her house clean and beautiful, even though there are no longer other families to visit it. Initially, she appears to be satisfied with her life under the floorboards and expresses discomfort at Arrietty’s desire to go borrowing, believing that such work is not appropriate for women. This attitude mirrors the rigidity of similar real-world restrictions that British women often faced and that the harsh realities of the post-war years rendered obsolete.
