10 Classic Women Writers and Their Cats
By Nava Atlas | On July 29, 2022 | Updated July 29, 2024 | Comments (4)
When I created a roundup of classic women authors and their dogs, it seemed that dogs might have an edge as the preferred furry friends of writers. But digging deeper, I’m no longer convinced that this is the case. As it turns out, women writers and their cats have long been just as companionable.
Let’s take a look at some beloved women writers and the feline companions who at the very least comforted them, and in some cases, even inspired some of their writings.
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Colette
French author Colette, best known for Gigi and the Claudine stories, was a noted cat lover. Her 1936 novella, La Chatte, is about a love triangle of sorts — between a young woman, her new husband, and the cat he clearly favor over her.
Colette is often credited with the aphorism “Time spent with a cat is never wasted,” but since it’s also attributed to Sigmund Freud, and neither of them wrote in English, it’s likely neither of them said it. Colette would have heartily agreed with the sentiment, though.
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Beverly Cleary
Anyone who has an office or studio that their cat has access to knows that he or she just can’t wait to walk all over your papers. Here’s prolific children’s book author Beverly Cleary(known for the Ramona Quimby series and many others) and her longtime feline companion Kitty, around 1955.
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Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym became known for her novels about the small comforts of mid-twentieth-century Englishwomen’s daily lives (Excellent Women and many others). In her real life she apparently found comfort in a cats, too. The one in this photo, Minerva, was a favorite.
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Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith, who broke into print with the classic thriller Strangers on a Train (and later The Talented Mr. Ripley, among many others), was famously a people-hater. She loved animals, especially cats, though that’s not to say that this complicated writer was necessarily a cozy cat mom. A biographer wrote that her relationship with cats “often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection.”
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Doris Lessing
Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing may have been known for the feminist classic, The Golden Notebook (and later, complex novels in the science fiction realm), but she was so enamored of her feline companions that she produced a little-known memoir, On Cats (2008).*
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L.M. Montgomery
L.M. Montgomery, Canadian author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series was a great observer of both human and cat nature. Drawn from her journals, Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat tells of the constancy of her feline companion as she struggled to produce her first writings. In Anne of the Island, a character says of cats: “I love them, they are so nice and selfish. Dogs are TOO good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.”
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Elizabeth Bishop
Esteemed poet Elizabeth Bishop was a lifelong cat lover, starting with her the feline of her young adulthood, Minnow. Her early poem, “Lullaby for the Cat” has the odd lines:
Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
When the brilliant fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin was alive, she wrote a blog from the perspective of her black-and-white cat, Pard (the famous photo above is another cat; there don’t seem to be any of her with Pard). Here are some of them. Le Guin expressed her love for felines in her children’s series, Catwings.
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Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch, the Irish-born British novelist and philosopher is evidently quite cozy with this cat, but details about her feline friend are hard to come by. She seemed to be drawn to cat-loving friends and lovers, who she dubbed, in philosophical mode, “felinists.”
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Margaret Mitchell
In this photo of the young and beautiful Margaret Mitchell (author of Gone With the Wind), it’s not clear whether this is actually her cat, but it’s one of those photos that has become iconic.
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I got to thinking about this when I heard that my friend and colleague Bob Eckstein had produced The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway). Bob is a New Yorker cartoonist and a wonderful watercolorist. You may also enjoy this excerpt from his books, Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores and Footnotes From the Most Fascinating Museums.
On the subject of naming cats, Bob observes:
Online studies from respected cat blogs have shown that 80% of cat owners regret the name they gave their kitten. Number one reason? “It became too popular.” (Number two reason given was “Too stupid to say in front of company.”)
It’s hard to say how much thought our classic women authors gave to naming their cats, or whether they would have gone with some of Bob’s often hilarious suggestions (Catsy Cline, Mick Jaguar, Purradise Lost).
The Complete Book of Cat Names by Bob Eckstein
is available on Bookshop.org* & wherever books are sold
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*This is a Bookshop.org affiliate link. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.
I had a Siamese cat named Colette. Beautiful companion
Annabel, what an appropriate name for a cat!
That is so awesome, Mary!
I named my current companion cat Colette after the French writer. Colette and I “speak” French together, and she is the joy of my life.