Throughout history, writers have shared a special relationship with their feline friends. In Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them, the Australian-Canadian author Susannah Fullerton delves into the stories of famous authors who shared their lives with a cat or two.
It’s a delightful book, though not all the inclusions are happy ones. When Horace Walpole’s puss Selima was found drowned in his large Chinoiserie goldfish bowl, Fullerton describes how ‘the golden fish swam around the corpse of this strange creature that had fallen into their aquatic home’. The sad passing was memorialised in a lengthy poem by Walpole’s friend Thomas Gray, today known as Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes.
Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them – quick links
Literary cats through the ages
Fullerton also shares the background to Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 story The Cat That Walked by Himself. A creation tale set in the Stone Age, it is about a family who give a cat food and a place by the fire in return for his able mouse-catching, though the cat is never truly domesticated and continues to roam the woods at night.
There’s also a wonderful history of the literary Cheshire Cat, which was first recorded in 1788 in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. ‘He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of anyone who shews [sic] his teeth and gums in laughing,’ wrote Grose.
Fullerton acknowledges the good people of Cheshire prefer to think of the saying as an acknowledgment of their superior dairy farms, because ‘the richness of the milk produced there would make any feline smile,’ she writes.
Think of an author you love and there’s probably a chapter here about the ‘cat who owned them’. There’s Mysouff I ‘who permitted Alexandre Dumas to escort him home,’ Bob, the deaf kitten, ‘who helped Charles Dickens open letters,’ and Nelson who was ‘Chief Mouser to Sir Winston Churchill’.
There’s also the story of Ernest and Mary Hemingway who apparently had 54 cats in their home. Astonishingly ‘Hemingway could identify and name each one,’ Fullerton writes. Each little chapter is a joy.
The book ends with a tribute to Wooskit, the cat who ‘condescended’ to live with New Zealand children’s author and illustrator Dame Lynley Dodd. Wooskit was the inspiration for Slinky Malinki, the black cat character in Dodd’s famed Hairy Maclary series.
This series of picture books has now sold over five million copies worldwide, so Wooskit is very famous indeed.
Paw prints on Fullerton’s own life
Fullerton has shared her life with many cats over the years. Yes, she’s definitely a cat lady, but she’s also very much a writer and literary historian too, and has been President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia for almost 30 years.
In the appropriately-named Tailpiece, Fullerton says that ‘writers, throughout history, in their lonely occupation have turned to cats for comfort, inspiration and companionship…The paw prints of the feline species have made a mark in literature’.
Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them is written with real wit and affection, and is beautifully presented with line drawings of special cats. It’s a charming book, and may well be the result of Fullerton’s own cats, so cheers to them, one and all.
Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them is published by Bodleian Library Publishing, and released in Australia via New South Books.
