I so rarely, if ever, get political in these Literary Ladies newsletters, but please indulge me this once in joining the chorus of revulsion at the “childless cat ladies” remark by a potentially dangerous nobody that the GOP deems ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The cat fanciers following were all brilliant, unlike him. Three of these ten literary cat ladies did have children, but really, that’s irrelevant and none of our business. We’ll still be reading and admiring them long after the aforementioned chump is forgotten.
I first created a roundup of classic women authors and their dogs; at the time it seemed that dogs had an edge as writers’ furry companions. But digging deeper, I'm no longer convinced that this is the case. Women writers and their cats have long been just as deeply bonded.
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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 favors. 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.
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.
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 found comfort in cats, too. The one in this photo, Minerva, was a favorite.
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 the coziest of cat moms. A biographer wrote that her relationship with cats “often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection.”
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).
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 one special feline companion, Daffy, 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."
Esteemed poet Elizabeth Bishop was a lifelong cat lover, starting with the feline of her young adulthood, Minnow. Her 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.
The brilliant fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin 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. She expressed her love for cats in her children’s series, Catwings.
In this photo of the young 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.
Iris Murdoch, the Irish-born British novelist and philosopher (the favorite writer of my son, Evan, who shares his own philosophical thoughts on Mapping with Atlas) is evidently quite cozy with this cat, but details about her feline friend are hard to come by. I love this cat’s expression, don’t you?
I got the idea to do this roundup when I learned that my friend and colleague Bob Eckstein produced The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway) in 2022.
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 is available on Bookshop.org & wherever books are sold. You may also enjoy this excerpt from his most recent book, Footnotes From the Most Fascinating Museums.
And now, Bob Eckstein and I are creating a book together (I’m the writer, he’s the illustrator) on the bond between well-known writers past and present and their cats (to be published in September, 2025). Join Bob’s Substack for humor, insights on the writing life, and more.
Wonderful!! ❤️🐾 I’m a dog person these days, but guess what? If you want a canine version of a cat, try a poodle! Anyway, I love cats, too—they fascinate and thoroughly amuse me! Growing up, we always had a cat and my mom (who raised 8 kids on her own—7 of them sons) adored cats over kids. The older I get, the more I get it.
Honestly, I am not a cat lover--they make it hard for me to breathe. But many of my favorite people are cat ladies and cat people generally, so I love the timing of this post! And I'm excited for the forthcoming books!