Sense of Loss, Belonging, and Storytelling: An Anglo-Indian Narrator in The Borrowers

Abstract

Mary Norton’s The Borrowers has a complicated narrative framework, through which the story of the small people, the Borrowers, is told. Once we find that the embedded story is carefully set at the turn of the nineteenth century, parallels with Burnett’s The Secret Garden are recognized, in which a lonely Anglo-Indian child experiences some mysterious happenings in an old English country house. Sharing the cultural ambiguity and the sense of loss, both the Garden’s Mary and The Borrowers’ Boy tell stories. Comparing the two works, I will explore the specific cultural meaning of the life of an Anglo-Indian child, and how it relates to the theme of The Borrowers.