Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them with Susannah Fullerton

Who are the cats who inspired literary writers like Edward Lear and Dorothy L Sayers? Zazie and Kristi are joined by Susannah Fullerton to find out.

By Zazie Todd, PhD

Listen to episode 66 of The Pawsitive Post in Conversation wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify) or below, watch on Youtube or below, or scroll down for the show notes and a transcript.

Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them with Susannah Fullerton

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Zazie and Kristi chat with Susannah Fullerton about her delightful book, Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them.

We talk about:

•     whether there is a special affiliation between writers and cats
•     how Susannah chose the writers to include in the book
•     some famous cats, including Hodge, who was a very fine cat indeed
•     Daffy, the cat who knew Anne of Green Gables before anyone else
•     why TS Eliot doesn't get a whole chapter despite inspiring the musical Cats
•     Dorothy L Sayers' cat Blitz
•     what the writers' accounts of their cats tell us about how the human-feline relationship has changed over the years
•     we get some of Susannah's favourite titbits from the book and ask which is her favourite cat
•     we learn about Susannah's upcoming book, Great Writers and the Dogs Who Loved Them
•     and finally we ask what she's been reading

You can see examples of Edward Lear's drawings of his cat Foss in this post on Susannah's website.

The book Susannah recommended to us is Anne's Cradle: The Life and Works of Hanako Muraoka, Japanese Translator of Anne of Green Gables by Eri Muraoka and Cathy Hirano.

Susannah Fullerton is Sydney’s most highly regarded literary historian and lecturer. She is a leading authority on 19th and 20th-century writers with a special interest in Jane Austen. She brings to life the lives and writings of great writers with fascinating talks and in literary tours around the world. In 2017 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to literature.

She's the author of Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them, which is available wherever books are sold.

Learn more and sign up for her newsletter at https://susannahfullerton.com.au/

The conversation with Susannah Fullerton

Zazie: Do you think cats and writers have a special relationship?

And what do we know about the cats who inspired great writers? We're going to find out today from Susanna Fullerton, who is the author of an absolutely delightful book, Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them.

Welcome to The Pawsitive Post in Conversation. I'm Zazie Todd. I'm joined, as always, by my friend and co host, Kristi Benson.

And Kristi, I think we all know that Apricat likes to help you with podcast recordings, but does he like to help you when you're writing?

Kristi: I'm pretty sure our whole audience could hear the air quotes around help there.

Apricat does like to warm my lap as I work at my computer. Yes. So he's a very. A good assistant.

Zazie: That is very good. Melina typically does not like to keep me company when I'm writing, but at the end of the day, when she wants me to stop, she sometimes sits on my desk and wraps my knuckles while I'm typing.

Luckily, no claws.

So today we're joined by Susannah Fullerton. Susannah is Sydney's most highly regarded literary historian and lecturer. She's a leading authority on 19th and 20th century writers with a special interest in Jane Austen.

She brings to life the lives and writings of great writers with fascinating talks and also in literary tours around the world. And she's got some upcoming tours in Spain and in England which look awesome.

And in 2017, she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to literature. And so she's joining us today to tell us about her book, Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them.

And it's an absolutely delightful book that tells us about, I think it's 17 different writers and it's full of gorgeous anecdotes about the cats and the writers and it's just so fun and interesting.

It would be a great gift for anyone who loves cats. And it's got delightful little drawings in too. I was just showing Kristi one of the drawings beforehand of one of Dickens's cats.

Sorry, Darwin's cats. [as you'll hear later, it was Dickens' cat Bob]

So, Susannah, thank you so much for joining us today to be here.

Susannah: Thank you.

Zazie: Do you think there is a special affiliation between writers and cats?

Susannah: Yes, I do. I think cats are very quiet. In a study, writing is obviously a lonely job. It's nice to have a companion there, but not one that's too demanding. Cats, unlike dogs, don't have to be taken for a walk.

I think sometimes they can rouse a sleepy author from their beds in the morning to persuade them to get up, mainly to feed the cat, but then, of course, to get on with writing.

So, yes, I think it's a lovely relationship. And so many different authors have found incredible companionship, warmth, occasionally frustration when that cat walks over the computer keys or sits on the very page of manuscript that you want to work on.

That, of course, can be something of a problem.

But I think cats and writers have had a marvelous relationship. And what I wanted to do in my book was to show how one particular cat in the life of the author,

had inspired poems, novels, short stories, letters, whatever it might be.

And also, of course, given love and companionship.

Kristi: I love that as like a way into the author's way, into their writing, into their process, into their life. That's such an interesting sort of view to take.

So how did you decide which cats and writers to include?

Susannah: Well, that was something of a challenge.

I did research the odd writer and then discovered that there really wasn't enough information.

And one example of that was T.S. Eliot, who of course, wrote his famous cat poems which became the musical Cats.

He seemed a very obvious choice, but when I looked at his life, it was really hard to find one cat that had given him a lot of inspiration.

Obviously, he did have cats. He was owned by cats.

But finding one, even to find out a name a cat in his own life, proved to be very difficult.

So between the chapters on authors in my book, I've got what I call little pauses, pun intended.

And I've included T.S. Eliot in one of those pauses because there was enough information there, but not enough for a whole chapter.

I also wanted variety. I wanted male and female authors. I wanted a variety of countries.

So Canada, America, the U.K. of course, England, Scotland, and I've got a New Zealand author in there as well.

So I wanted a variety of countries, a variety of different cats.

Some of them have got pedigree cats, others have just got ordinary tabbies or moggies, whatever it might be.

So I wanted variety there as well. And I begin my book with Dr. Johnson in the 18th century. And the last chapter in the book is on a living author So I wanted to bring the book really up to date.

Zazie: And I love that range in the book. I think that's really nice.

We want to ask about some of the specific cats that are in the book. So let's start with a cat called Hodge. Because I think even if people haven't heard of Hodge, they will have heard the phrase that he is a very fine cat indeed.

Susannah: Yes, I loved writing about Dr. Johnson.

Life for cats in 18th century London was not always easy.

From the Middle Ages, people had regarded cats as the familiars of witches or even the devil.

They were often very badly treated, stoned and ill treated.

They were useful because they killed the rodents. So people put up with cats around the barns or whatever. But cats were quite rarely invited into the home and made a loving pet of.

So Dr. Johnson was different. He somehow acquired Hodge. We don't know how probably Hodge was a street cat. It was one very lucky day for him when he met the great Dr. Samuel Johnson.

And he was there living in the fabulous Dr. Johnson house that you can visit in London today in Gough Square. It's tucked in just off Fleet Street.

And Hodge was there with him as he was working on his great dictionary of the English language.

And I like to think that Hodge sat on that C page where the word cat was defined by Dr. Johnson. And Johnson would go out and buy his cat oysters from a local oyster seller.

They were then the food of the poor, so not as pricey as they would be today. But Hodge very nicely on oysters. And if you visit the Dr. Johnson House today, just outside in the little square, there's a really charming statue of Hodge.

He's sitting on a copy of the dictionary and next to him are a couple of empty oyster shells. And he's child height. So children who are visiting can give Hodge a pat and read the quote on the base of the statue.

A very fine cat indeed.

So it's a really lovely tribute to Dr. Johnson's fabulous cat, Hodge.

Kristi: And then both Zazie and I are Canadian. We're also interested in, of course, Daffy,

who's the cat who knew Anne of Green Gables before anybody else. So what can you tell us about that?

Susannah: Yes, Daffy was a lucky cat. Later in her life, L.M. Montgomery had a cat that she named Lucky. And she dedicated one of her novels to Lucky. But I think the cats were misnamed.

I think it was Daffy who was the lucky cat. Because Daffy was there keeping her warm on those cold Canadian mornings as she would worked away on that utterly wonderful Story of an orphan girl growing up in Prince Edward Island.

Montgomery adored cats. She included cats in her journals. There are little tufts of cat fur. There are obituaries for the cats that died.

I think she had a difficult life in many ways. She lost her parents, her mother, very early.

Her father remarried and moved away.

She was left living with very strict grandparents who did not share her love of cats.

Then she had a challenging marriage with a man who suffered from severe depression.

She had copyright battles to fight.

She had a lot of difficulties in her life, and I think cats gave her the therapy that she needed.

She said that again and again, that cats really helped her to get through some of the challenges that she had.

And of course, her finer characters in her books, her heroines like Anne and Emily, they all love cats. And, you know, when Gilbert Bly makes his second proposal to Ann Shirley and he offers her a cat along with the marriage, you know she's going to say, yes,

Zazie: Yes, I love that. And I think the whole book is just full of lots of lovely little anecdotes about cats. And for example, one of the ones that I didn't know beforehand was that tortoiseshell cats used to be called Spanish cats.

I found that really interesting.

So do you have a favorite tidbit of information about cats that you put in the book?

Susannah: Well, what I really loved learning, as I researched the book and try to show in my book, is how cat care has changed over the years.

How did you deal with a sick cat before vets were available up in, say, the north of England?

Robert Southey's wonderful cat, Rumpelstiltskin, When it got sick, what could Southey do? And when were vets first trained? I discovered the first vet training school was in France in the 1700s, but it took a long time for vets to get to remoter parts of Europe and of Britain.

So I was intrigued to learn about things like when was kitty litter first invented for a cat, all sorts of details like that.

So I try to sort of fill in how cat care has changed, who wrote the very first book on cat care, things like that. So I love learning more about the treatment of cats over the ages and trying to sort of weave that in with the authors as things changed throughout the 19th century and then into the 20th and into the 21st.

So cats have not always been well treated, and of course, drowning litters of kittens was common and awful, and people have not always been kind to cats. So it was good to see that things have improved over the centuries. 

But I loved all that historical detail as I was researching for my book

Kristi: that's, it's interesting to hear like about, I guess about how veterinary care and other sort of specialized care for cats might have spread because I actually, when I lived in the Western Canadian Arctic for a number of years, and the closest vet for us was a 14 hour drive or a flight like so it was quite far.

And we all had pets. You know, a friend of mine had a cat who got, you know, involved in a vehicle accident, ended up needing an amputation. But it was so it was like, you know, overnight we had to try and deliver sort of first aid care to this cat. It was very enormously stressful. 

So it's very nice to have vet care as close as we have it now, which is just a quick 45 minute drive that's much easier. 

Susannah: And one of the authors in my book, Doris Lessing, who had a beautiful cat called Il Magnifico, he sadly developed problems and he needed to have one of his front legs amputated.

And Doris Lessing wrote a wonderful little sort of a long short story called the Old Age of Il Magnifico. And it's a very moving piece of writing about her disabled cat and how it had to cope with no leg when once there was a second leg at the front.

You know, how does a cat jump up onto a bed or go downstairs when a front leg is missing? It's a really beautiful piece of writing. I strongly recommend that people read it.

And of course, you know, writers observe all these things so closely and then write about them so movingly. Losing a cat,

worrying when your cat is sick, panicking when your cat goes missing. Mark Twain's went missing. He offered a $5 reward and hundreds of people turned up with black cats hoping it might be bambino and they could claim the reward.

But also, I think more than anything, just wanting a glimpse of Mark Twain because he was so famous, it gave them a good excuse to get to see the author.

Kristi: Wow.

Susannah: Mark Twain adored cats. He once famously commented, if man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

So wonderful comment from Mark Twain.

Kristi: So overall, how do you feel like taking this lens of authors and their relationship with cats? How do you think that relationships with cats have changed over the years? How are we seeing it through this sort of.

Susannah: Well, as I said with Dr. Johnson, you know, people were often cruel to cats and some of the cat owners or the people owned by cats in my book did meet with incomprehension from others.

You know, why do you love a cat so much? Why are you spoiling your cat? Why are you feeding your cat good food?

There should be creatures out in the barn catching the rats and the mice.

So I think we've learned over the last few years, couple of hundred years, what wonderful companions cats can be.

And that comes through, I think, very strongly in my book. But cats can also provide literary inspiration.

You know, Dame Muriel Spark, the Scottish author, had a cat, a Persian cat, that got rather entangled in a fur coat that a posh visitor had put down on the chair. And she ends up writing this wonderful poem called Bluebell, the name of her cat amongst the sable.

And she's got no sympathy for the lady's fur coat. She's just interested in what her cat is doing and enjoying.

So I think my book is certainly one that will appeal to cataholics.

But I have had people who don't like cats at all say how much they've enjoyed the book because they've just learned about the challenges and the joys of sharing one's home with an animal,

how good it is for children to grow up with an animal and learn the lessons, that you've got to be responsible. You've got to remember to feed, to protect the animal, to look after it when it gets sick.

So I think even if you're not a cat lover, there's lots of history and there's literary anecdotes and you sort of get to know the 17 different authors through the lens of an animal.

And I had so much fun writing it, from Sir Winston Churchill to Charles Dickens to Paul Gallico, Margaret Mitchell,

Muriel Spark, and then the fabulous New Zealand writer Dame Linley dod, who has created wonderful children's books, Slinky, Malinky, Hairy Maclary, which is about dogs,

and, you know, other wonderful children's stories. So I had lots of variety and that seems to be appealing because I've had lovely comments about the book and it's been selling really nicely.

Zazie: Good, I'm glad to hear it. I mean, it's got such lovely stories and I actually just want to pick up on another one that I really enjoyed in the book, which is the story of Blitz, Dorothy L Sayers cat, who was found as a kitten in the Blitz.

Can you tell us a bit more about Blitz?

Susannah: Yes. Dorothy L Sayers loved cats, but led quite an unsettled life for a while and couldn't really offer a home to a cat.

But finally she began to get cats. She had a mouse problem in her flat, and cats sorted that out.

And she was living just out of London during the Second World War, but one day she went into London to see her publisher and she found a tiny ginger kitten in a bomb site.

So she took the cat home and wonderfully, I think, named the cat Blitz.

And today, in the village of Whitham in Essex, where she lived, there's a fabulous statue of Dorothy, and Blitz is there at her ankles, sort of twining around her ankles.

So Blitz lived to be 15, had a very good life, but Dorothy, of course, was looking after her cat during a time of rationing, and you needed ration coupons, and it wasn't easy to feed an animal.

So she actually ended up writing a wonderful poem called War Cat, where she apologizes to Blitz for not being able to give Blitz all the lovely food that Blitz would like to be eating.

So you get all sorts of different ways of responding to cats, whether poetry, short stories, novels, whatever it might be.

And Dorothy loved Blitz. She said he was the finest of all the cats that she had. But during the war, a lot of her friends gave her their cats to look after, and the cats all bred, and she reckoned in the end she was running a business called Kittens Unlimited.

And it was rather dangerous to go and visit Dorothy at that time, because the chances were you would leave with a kitten under your arm. She was always looking for homes for all these extra kittens that she had.

Kristi: So we're hearing about a lot of different cats with these fun names. Daffy and, you know, did you have any favorite names as you were writing the book?

Susannah: Well, I loved Southey's cat, Rumpelstiltskin, who was usually known just as Rumple. But I think probably the favorite cat when I wrote the book was Edward Lear's wonderful cat, who was originally named Aderphos, but he shortened the name to Foss, F O, double S.

And Edward Lear was, as well as a fine writer of Limerick, particularly, was a very fine artist. He actually earned his major living from painting and from drawings.

And he did many fabulous illustrations of caricatures of himself. He was rather rotund and of Foss. And Foss was missing half a tail. You can find out why in my book.

And Foss was rather portly and striped, and Edward Lear does fabulous drawings. So if you google Foss and Edward Lear, some of those wonderful caricatures and drawings will come up.

And Edward Lear was a rather lonely man. He never married. He suffered from epilepsy, which then was little understood, and he was embarrassed about it.

So he lived on his own until he got Foss. And then Foss gave him the most wonderful companionship.

Lear died only a couple of months after Foss died. He missed the cat terribly, gave the cat a very elaborate tombstone and funeral, far more elaborate than his own tombstone and funeral two months later.

And Foss just inspired limericks and drawings. And he wrote about Foss and his letters. He watched what Foss did. He just adored Foss. And I became incredibly fond of Foss as I wrote the book.

Foss actually has his own Wikipedia entry, so you can look up Foss, learn all about this wonderful famous cat.

And he really was a complete joy to write about.

So he was, I think, the favorite, but so many others, I mean, you know, Dickens was never a cat man, but he ended up getting, eventually, through his daughter, getting a cat called Bob, who was deaf.

And Bob, when he wanted Dickens' attention because Dickens was too busy reading or writing, would reach out a paw and he would snuff the candle and Dickens would be plunged into darkness and would have to look up and give Bob some attention.

So he was sort of won over by just the one cat.

Others had many. Ernest Hemingway at one time had 54 cats on his property in Cuba. And he knew the names of all of them. He loved them.

He was a complete cataholic and put his fabulous cat Boise into one of his novels for 35 pages, covering the cat in the novel Islands and the Stream.

He really worshiped cats. So it was fascinating to see the different personalities, the responses to cats being won over by cats loving cats from the very beginning and such a range in between.

So the book was huge fun to write. I just loved every minute of doing.

Zazie: Seems like it must have been so much fun to put it together.

And I heard that you also have some exciting news for people who love dogs, too.

Susannah: I do. Well, the book has been, as I said, selling very well. And to my utter joy, it was published by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. They have produced it very beautifully. It's a very handsome volume indeed.

And they have now sent me a contract to write my second book on the subject of writers and animals. And that book is going to be great writers and the dogs who love them, because cats own you.

Dogs love you.

So I'm now having a lot of fun, busy on various authors with their dogs, selecting my different authors.

It will be very similar, on the same sort of lines, a similar number of authors with the little pauses of quirky information in between.

So now I'm busy with dogs, which is great fun. But while I have had both dogs and cats in my life at the moment, I. I've got one cat.

I'm probably a little bit more of a cat person than a dog person, but I do love both. So working on my dog book is great fun and that's going to be published in 2028.

So something for dog lovers I hope to look forward to.

Zazie: Definitely something to look forward to. And you mentioned what a great job they did of publishing this book. So I'm going to hold it up to the camera again. So it's got a really beautiful cover here.

And I also, I'm going to show you the drawing that it's got a bookmarker in it and it's got these lovely drawings. So that one is the cat snuffing out the candle or about to snuff out the candle.

It's a really beautifully produced book as well as a really lovely book to read. And as an author myself, I always love it when a book is kind of well made.

So our last question for our guests is always to ask what you have read recently that you loved. So can you recommend a book to us, please?

Susannah: Been reading something that's to do with your great Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery. I have been an Ann tragic all of my life,

and I came across this really, really interesting book. I don't know how well everybody can see it,

but it is called Anne's the Life and Works of Hanako Muraoka. Now, Hanako was the very first person to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese.

And it's the story of her life and how her who life was changed by Anne of Green Gables.

She grew up in a school in Japan where she was taught by some Canadian missionaries.

And just before World War II, these missionaries needed to leave in a hurry.

One of them handed her a book called Anne of Green Gables and said, I think you might like this. Now, Hanako had been working on translations of children's books. She felt that in Japan there was a real shortage of sort of good family reading that could be enjoyed by every member of the family.

So during the war, she worked on translating L.M. Montgomery's first classic, Anne of Green Gables. But this was quite dangerous because, of course,

Montgomery was regarded as an enemy alien during the war. So she had to keep the manuscript a secret. And when there were bombing raids, she would tuck it up in lots of other things and she'd take it with her into the bomb shelter.

And after the war, it would take take quite a long time before she could find a publisher willing to produce the story of a red headed orphan in Prince Edward Island.

When finally it was published in Japan, it became phenomenally popular. And Hanako went on to translate all of the Anne books, all three Emily books, and a couple of other Montgomery novels as well.

And she became a hugely loved figure in Japan because of her translation of Anne of Green Gables. And the Japanese, they visit Prince Edward island in large numbers. They absolutely adore the Anne books. So I found this book a really intriguing read because I learned something about Japan, particularly during the war.

I learned about some of the challenges of translation.

What do you call the book? She felt the Japanese wouldn't understand what a Gable was. So could you call the book Anne of Green Gables in Japanese?

In the end it gets called Red Headed Anne.

So I just learned so much from it and I found it a really intriguing book.

So that's one I can strongly recommend. Anne of Green Gables with a bit of a difference.

Zazie: Thank you. That sounds really interesting.

So your book, Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them is available wherever books are sold.

And where can people go if they want to learn more about you?

Susannah: Well, I do have a website.

The other thing that people might be interested in is that on the first day of every month, I send out a free newsletter.

It's called Notes from a Book Addict. I give book recommendations, I include a wonderful poem. Every month.

I celebrate literary anniversaries. I talk about the delights of being a lover of books in all sorts of ways.

So people can sign up for that on my website. You just need to put in your email address and your first name. And then Notes from a Book Addict will come to you every month.

Susannah: Also on my website are some of my other books, so those can be ordered through the website.

And also I produce quite a few illustrated lectures that have been recorded so people can purchase those at very low cost. They're a few dollars each to get some of my lectures about famous writers and their works.

So those are the ways people can find out a little bit more.

I just love sharing my passion for books with other people.

I'm always delighted to welcome fellow book lovers to my newsletter and the various things on my website and of course my literary tours. So I take people not just from Australia, but from all over the world.

I have had Canadians come on my literary tours.

So again, details of those are on my website and I love to have others join me on literary travels around the world.

Zazie: Awesome. And I've actually been subscribed to your newsletter for a few years and love all the book recommendations in it as well. So yes, I recommend that and I definitely recommend great writers and the cats who own them.

Thank you so much for coming to join us today to talk about it.

Susannah: My pleasure. Thank you both very much. It's been lovely chatting with you.

Zazie: Thank you. And today I'd just like to give a special shout out to our listeners and viewers in Perth in Western Australia and wherever you're joining us from. Thank you for being here with us.

If you like the show, please leave us a comment. You can leave us a voicemail straight from your podcast app or if you're on YouTube, you can just drop us a comment down below.

And we would love to know about which books you love and which cats, whether your cat joins you when you're reading them, for example.

So let us know how you found this show and we will see you next time. Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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