The Borrowers

In The Borrowers, Mrs. May is an old woman and the sister of the primary human character, a child known only as “the boy." She is very proper and sensible, but her story reveals that she has preserved a childlike sense of wonder in her believe in the existence of tiny people called the Borrowers, and this sense of wonder makes itself even more evident in her eagerness to share and embellish this amazing tale for Kate’s amusement. In this way, Mrs. May not only indulges her own sense of whimsy and magic, but she also acts to keep that magic alive by bringing it to life in the mind of the girl sitting next to her. Her retelling of her brother’s alleged adventures thus represents the power of oral tradition to keep tales alive, as just as she passes on the story of the Borrowers, many generations of real-world people have breathed life into the mythical stories of fairies, elves, and other magical creations, whose notoriety in fable and folklore spans generations and gains a life of its own.

However, although it is clear that she wants to believe the Borrowers are real, Mrs. May still maintains a healthy level of skepticism in the truth of her own story. In the final scene of the book, when Kate becomes convinced that it is entirely true, Mrs. May reminds her that it is possible that her brother made everything up just to trick her and her sisters.

The boy is Mrs. May’s brother, who would go on to eventually perish in World War I. He is a sickly child when he is first introduced, having been sent to England from India to recover from rheumatic fever. When Arrietty first meets him, she describes him as angry, but it is quickly revealed that he is a gentle soul who only wants to help the Clock family. His anger comes from what he sees as harsh treatment from Mrs. Driver and Great Aunt Sophy, who are not accustomed to having a young boy in the house.

It is never fully apparent whether the boy actually met the Borrowers, whether he made up the story completely, or whether they were a figment of his imagination. He is the only human character to actually speak with a Borrower; the adults are never able to find them despite their best efforts. Within the story, his character develops largely in line with Arrietty’s; both mature significantly as the book progresses and change from innocent, trusting children into complex individuals who are instrumental in helping the Clock family survive and escape, thus bringing the coming-of-age aspects of the story to fruition from both a human perspective and a Borrower’s perspective.

Along with the boy, the human house is occupied by his Great Aunt Sophy, the housekeeper, Mrs. Driver, and sometimes the gardener, Crampfurl. Sophy is the most sympathetic of the three; she is a bedridden old woman who often drinks madeira wine and, until the boy meets Pod, is the only human to whom Pod feels comfortable speaking given her tendency to dismiss him as a hallucination. The Clock family refers to Sophy only as “Her,” and it is implied that she is the longest standing resident of the house and is someone with whom the Borrowers have been familiar their entire lives.

Mrs. Driver and Crampfurl are usually shown together, sitting in the kitchen drinking wine and complaining about the boy, and this dynamic further emphasizes their shared role as the villains of the story. They ultimately serve as symbols of human cruelty and embodiments of the evil tendencies that the Borrowers initially believe all humans to possess. Mrs. Driver is especially malicious; she is cruel to the boy, wants to kill the Borrowers, and is dismissed by the policemen because of how badly she treated them when they were children.

Pod is a talented borrower and shoemaker who is known for his skill at climbing chairs and curtains to reach items that he wishes to take. He is also shown to be very educated for a Borrower; unlike most of his long-departed family members, he can write the alphabet and count to almost a thousand. His talent for building, exploring, and problem-solving also renders him a symbol of the strong, capable, workaday British family man who provides for his wife and daughter and does his best to shield them from the many dangers of the world. In this, he is both traditional and progressive, for just as he initially prefers to keep Arrietty locked safely away from the wider world, he also finally acknowledges that exposing her to that same world while preparing her to deal with the risks involved is a much more responsible approach to parenting. Although the fate of his niece Eggletina has engendered within him a sense of paranoia about all things human, as the story progresses, he begins to realize that Arrietty is just as brave as he is and that she has the strength and talents to become a borrower even though she is a girl.

Arrietty is the main character of the book and is a 13-year-old Borrower who lives in an isolated hole under the kitchen and longs for a life of freedom. Unlike most Borrowers, she has taught herself to read and spends every night writing in her diary. Despite (or perhaps because of) her precociousness, Arrietty is shown to be very self-willed and creates a dangerous situation for her family when she openly talks to the human boy and gives away many of the secrets that have kept the Clock family safe and undetected for years.

Although she begins the tale wishing for freedom and resenting her parents’ protectiveness, Arrietty slowly begins to realize the importance of safety and the risks that exist in the human world all around her. She often sits in her cigar-box bedroom, listening to her parents’ worried voices and wishing that she could have both the comforts of her lifelong home and the freedom of the outside world. As a young Borrower, she has no memory of the bygone days when many families lived in the house and does not know why she can’t go out until her parents tell her the story of Eggletina. The memory of Eggletina thus haunts Arrietty’s current ambitions to explore the world, and she is forced to find ways to rebel against and contradict the family mythology of safety and isolation in which she initially lives. Her actions, while reckless, ultimately compel her parents to grow and change as individuals, adapting to their rapidly changing circumstances and struggling to survive despite the adversities that come their way, just as most British people were forced to do in the chaos and aftermath of World War II.

Homily, the Clock family matriarch, is portrayed as an obsessive housekeeper who often worries about her husband and daughter, especially after they begin borrowing together. Her fixation on the quality and appearance of her home emphasizes the fact that in her cautious isolation, her tiny home has become her entire world, for unlike Pod, she is not a Borrower and never ventures beyond the boundaries of the tiny house under the kitchen floorboards. She is desperate not to emigrate to the outside world, as she cannot imagine life without the comforts found inside the house, like running hot water.

In the beginning, she shows herself to be vain and dismissive of the other Borrower families, whom she believes are all quite pretentious, but Arrietty believes that Homily is jealous of the other families’ greater wealth and status. Thus, Homily’s attitudes also represent the insecurities that may be experienced by status-conscious lower-class women in real-world British society during the time frame in which Norton’s novel was published. Although Homily often expresses regret that she cares so much about material possessions, she becomes somewhat greedy when the boy befriends the family, as she covets all of the beautiful things he can provide and makes the mistake of seeing the things themselves as evidence of a higher social status and therefore worth the trouble and price of acquiring.

Pod’s brother Hendreary Clock and his wife Lupy left the house several years before the main story begins, their departure precipitated by a human’s discovery of Uncle Hendreary and a cat’s supposed attack on his daughter Eggletina, who mysteriously disappeared one day. Hendreary and Lupy took their other five children to a badger hole two fields away, an act which the Clock family describes as “moving abroad.” Although Pod suggests that he, Homily, and Arrietty move in with the Hendreary family after he himself is seen by the boy, Homily believes that the Hendreary children are wild and cannot imagine sharing a kitchen with Lupy.

One major plot point involves Arrietty sending a letter to Uncle Hendreary via the boy. She wants to ensure that her relatives are still alive, as he has convinced her that her family are the only Borrowers left in the world. She receives a mysterious response that suggests that Aunt Lupy has disappeared, which heightens her family’s fear of the dangerous outside world and leaves a loose thread that will be pursued in the succeeding novels in Norton’s series.