Although she wrote only eight novels in a career that extended from 1943 to 1982, Mary Norton is rightfully considered one of the major midcentury British children's authors. The Borrowers (1952), winner of the distinguished Carnegie Medal, quickly assumed status as a classic. The five sequels to that book developed what critic Gillian Avery called "a powerful mythology." Are All the Giants Dead" (1975) offered an ingenious contrast to the author's previous works. From the time of the appearance of her first novel, The Magic Bed-Knob: or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1943), Norton demonstrated a superb fusion of what T. S. Eliot called "tradition and the individual talent." She combined elements of her own experiences, transformed to meet the needs of her fantasies, with recognizable aspects of genres popular in British children's fiction of the first half of the twentieth century to create narratives that still maintain their...