The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

Author page

Mary Norton

2 universes Last reviewed 2026-10-13

Mary Norton, born Kathleen Mary Pearson on December 10, 1903, in London, England, was an English author who grew up in a Georgian house in Leighton Buzzard as the daughter of a physician. During the Second World War she worked for the British War Office beginning in 1940, and later for the British Purchasing Commission in New York City, where she began writing while employed there during the conflict. Her earliest fiction, The Magic Bed-Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944) and its sequel Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947), were later combined into the well-loved Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Norton achieved lasting fame with The Borrowers (1952), the first in a series continuing through 1982, which imagines a family of tiny people living secretly beneath the floorboards of an English house, surviving by "borrowing" items from the full-sized humans around them; later volumes included Are All the Giants Dead? (1975). The Borrowers won the Carnegie Medal in 1952, recognized as the year's outstanding children's book by a British author, and was later named among the top ten Medal-winning works during the award's 70th anniversary celebration in 2007. Norton died on August 29, 1992, in Bideford, Devon, at age 88.

Universe(s)

The Borrowers

  • Core Canon books: 5
  • Current rank: #344 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 4.03
  • Award recognitions: 1 won

Bed-Knob and Broomstick

  • Core Canon books: 1
  • Current rank: #434 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.99
  • Award recognitions: None recorded

Books

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

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