Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them

Susannah Fullerton’s Gift to the World of Readers and Reading

– by Dr Ruth Wilson, Patron, Jane Austen Society of Australia

Susannah Fullerton is renowned for her encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Austen. In her latest publication she proves to be equally and just as delightfully insightful about all things feline. The charm of the book starts with its appearance. The dust jacket is elegant; a subtle blend of muted sapphire and grey. At the centre two shaggy looking felines squat within a buttercup-coloured circle, their backs turned cheekily to the reader. Cats’ paws are splotched all over the front and back end- papers. A slender grosgrain ribbon protrudes from the book to mark the reader’s place. The combination of colours is subtle and seductive. This book is truly a thing of beauty.

Great Writers & the Cats who Owned Them is destined to be a winner with cat-loving readers, young and old, showing how intimacy with our pets can be as integral a part of the human condition as intimacy with family and friends. The delight of this book will extend also to those who like me, are neither cat lovers nor cat phobics, or, to use more technical terms, neither ‘philofelists’ nor ‘ailurophobes’. These words I encountered for the first time on the pages of this remarkably erudite book.

For me, the supreme achievement of this book lies in the lightness with which the author wears her erudition. Susannah Fullerton manages to combine her passion for cats and her encyclopaedic literary scholarship effortlessly in her discussion of authors who have found the companionship of a cat to be ‘a relief, a comfort and an inspiration’. Her tone is unfailingly conversational, easy on the ear and the eye; but in each of the seventeen chapters which features a great writer, she blends information in the form of social history, literary history, biographical detail and anecdotal records with wit and a wry sense of humour, to counteract any sense that this is information for the sake of information.

First, readers are introduced to a ninth century monk and eight verses in praise of his cat, written in Old Irish in the scriptorium of a German abbey. The monk is nameless, but his presence is evoked in the detail of his posture and his actions. We hear the scratching of his pen and the purring of the white cat curled in his lap. We learn about a medieval poetic manuscript that has inspired ‘translations, musical renditions, novels, a picture book, modern poetic versions and even an animated movie’. Similar gems of information, the fruit of impeccable and exhaustive research, are included in the accounts of each author. Among them are Samuel Johnson, pioneer of English dictionaries and his cat, Hodge, whose taste for oysters was indulged without regard for economy; Charles Dickens and the cat called Bob whose paw was carefully preserved as a memento by a taxidermist like a character in one of his novels; Lucy Maude Montgomery, author of the famous ‘Anne books’ for girls, whose many cats throughout her lifetime include ‘Daffy the Second – a silver gray, the dearest and handsomest cat I ever had’; and, shifting us into the twenty-first century, the Nobel Prize winning author, Doris Lessing, who was herself described as having a ‘cat-like kind of charm’ and her beloved El Magnifico, with whom, she said, she ‘communicated best’ of all her feline friends.

I was won over immediately by the promise of the introduction in which the author heralds what is to come. Eight pages in and I was spellbound. It was already clear that the great writer-cat-lovers whom Susan Fullerton has chosen to feature will become characters in a story about how so many four-footed creatures have brought comfort and joy and even inspiration into the lives of the two-footed geniuses who treasure them. And so, this book is also about writing itself; it is about the literary imagination and how, in some cases, the adored felines act as midwives. They assist at the union of words and the imagination that produces a great work of art. Like Jane Austen, her very own muse, Susannah Fullerton uses her gift for description to reveal a core of truth about how great writing is made.

Cat lovers and book lovers will take constant delight, as I did, in the long lists that include many more names of both writers and cats than those featured in the chapters: writers who indulge in wordplay when choosing names for their pets; writers who include pets in their works; cats who provide clues as to how characters should be judged; and many more. Fullerton herself is mistress of such literary strategies that bring books to life. Among them are the brief additional facts and sometimes reflections that conclude each chapter, given the witty heading, ‘paws for thought’; and the brilliantly titled ‘tailpiece’ that concludes the book and includes the ultimate list of writers – a hundred and I’m still counting – whom cats have ‘condescended’ to enslave.

So, I am predicting that this book will enslave readers too. No matter who they are, they will find, in Great Writers & the Cat who Owned Them, persons and pets whose stories will enchant them.