For this reason, the book was suppressed and censored during the reign of Mary Tudor. Though they possibly appear humorous and cute to modern readers, these stories were intended as sinister tales of horror, and an undercurrent of anti-Catholic sentiment and allusion runs throughout Baldwin’s book. The book includes an early version of the The King of the Cats folktale – one of my favourite folktales – a story about Grimalkin (possibly the first ever use of this name), and a description of a secret underworld of talking cats.
This short novel is set at Christmas and has a first person narrator, who regales his bedmates with a series of interlinked stories on various supernatural themes. Written in c.1553 and first published in 1561, Beware the Cat is often described as the first novel written in English. Got an awesome cat book to recommend? Leave a comment! If you would like to hear more about these titles, or the reasons why I chose them for this list, you can catch up with the show on the player below. As promised, this blog post simply gives details of all the books mentioned on the show.
I decided to avoid children’s books (just for now – there are some fantastic cats in children’s fiction and I may return to this theme on another show), and books about big cats or feline shapeshifters. I talked about some of my favourite books with memorable cats. Saturday 8th August was World Cat Day, so Hannah’s Bookshelf had a feline theme.
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