December 17, 1916

The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (December 17, 1916 to April 28, 2000) uses fresh and telling feline details in her stories.  The accurately observed will of course, be original. For example we have The Gate of Angels (1990) where children on their stomachs are "close to the bitter-smelling roots of the laurel hedge where the cat left the remains of her mice."

Fitzgerald used her observational talents in more than fiction. She wrote biographies including ones of a poet (Charlotte Mew),  and Ronald Knox, (a leading Anglican theologian) and his family. Her work won awards like National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997, for Blue Flower, and The Booker (1979) for Offshore. 

There is a biography, published by Hermione Lee, in 2013: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. A review of this book allows a useful summary of Fitzgerald's milieu.

Booker Prize–winning novelist Fitzgerald.... once observed, “I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.” In this illuminating biography, critic and scholar Lee (The Novels of Virginia Woolf) shows how Fitzgerald’s characters were drawn not just from real life but from her own life. Fitzgerald was born into a remarkably accomplished and well-connected family of clerics and writers: her father was the editor of the humor magazine Punch; an aunt (Winifred Peck) and uncle (Ronald Knox) were well-known authors; and their circle of acquaintances included Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, A.A. Milne, and other literary celebrities. “Mops” studied at Oxford and wrote radio plays for the BBC during WWII, but lived mostly in the shadow of her accomplished relatives. She got her chance to shine co-editing the cultural magazine World Review with her husband in 1950, but when the magazine folded in 1953, their lives fell apart and the couple and their three children spent years living in poverty aboard decrepit houseboats in London. Fitzgerald began publishing novels in 1977, at age 61, and Lee does an exceptional job of drawing lines of association between the author’s life and fiction. She mines details from Fitzgerald’s journals and notes to fill in the blanks of her famously self-effacing subject. ...

Can it be entirely an accident that her first published work was a biography of a cat lover? The close observation of cats we see, makes me wonder if a fellow feeling for cats was not part of her choice of subject in Edward Burne-Jones (1975).