Violet Hunt (September 28, 1862 to January 16, 1942) was born into an artistic clan and herself is a minor but charming footnote in English cultural history. Her family is connected with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood-- her father was the painter and Oxford classicist, Alfred William Hunt (no kin to William Holman Hunt, another member of that group.) Her liason with Ford Maddox Ford is not her only claim on our attention. Violet Hunt was a prolific writer, of novels and memoirs. Her mother was also a writer -- Margaret Raine Hunt published novels and translations.
Violet Hunt wrote that
"A cat is, of all animals, the most difficult to know ; it is so intimate, but so detached ; so dependent on human beings for its comfort, so loftily indifferent to their wishes."
She wrote this in The Cat, (1905.) This 231 page book, is told from the point of view of a kitten, born on April 23, to Petronilla, a blue smoke Persian cat. A brief excerpt:
It was the great advantage of mothers being a pet cat that she and her family lived in the house, not in a cattery, as they are called. Mother knew very well what a cattery was like—she had been in one before a man bought her and gave her to Auntie May as a present. She cost three guineas, she said. It was a very nice cattery, as catteries go—she admits that—and she will always look upon it with affection as being her first home, but still there was a lot of difference between it and Auntie May's house. A cattery has generally hard troddenin earth for a floor, without a carpet, except for a few unhemmed bits spread here and there. There's generally an old chair—wooden—to scrape your claws on: now velvet, such as is kept here, mother says, is much more interesting and efficacious. The bed is inside, under cover—I grant you that—but only made out of a few old packing cases, and there is generally a horrid smelly oillamp to warm the whole place. Now Auntie May had us in her own bedroom for the first week of our lives, and when she did move us, it was only into her study. She was an authoress and had to have a study; at least her father, who was a distinguished painter and R.A., and adores his daughter, thought she had as much right as he to have a studio—same word as study. 'She sells her books, and I don't sell my pictures!' he said. (I call her Auntie May because Rosamond does, and because it sounds more respectful, and mother said I ought.) Her study was quite nicely furnished and full of bureaus and manuscript cupboards and high things to perch on. Mother says it is advisable when choosing a perch to get as high as possible, because of the draughts that run along the floors of even the best rooms...
It was the great advantage of mothers being a pet cat that she and her family lived in the house, not in a cattery, as they are called. Mother knew very well what a cattery was like—she had been in one before a man bought her and gave her to Auntie May as a present. She cost three guineas, she said. It was a very nice cattery, as catteries go—she admits that—and she will always look upon it with affection as being her first home, but still there was a lot of difference between it and Auntie May's house. A cattery has generally hard troddenin earth for a floor, without a carpet, except for a few unhemmed bits spread here and there. There's generally an old chair—wooden—to scrape your claws on: now velvet, such as is kept here, mother says, is much more interesting and efficacious. The bed is inside, under cover—I grant you that—but only made out of a few old packing cases, and there is generally a horrid smelly oillamp to warm the whole place. Now Auntie May had us in her own bedroom for the first week of our lives, and when she did move us, it was only into her study. She was an authoress and had to have a study; at least her father, who was a distinguished painter and R.A., and adores his daughter, thought she had as much right as he to have a studio—same word as study. 'She sells her books, and I don't sell my pictures!' he said. (I call her Auntie May because Rosamond does, and because it sounds more respectful, and mother said I ought.) Her study was quite nicely furnished and full of bureaus and manuscript cupboards and high things to perch on. Mother says it is advisable when choosing a perch to get as high as possible, because of the draughts that run along the floors of even the best rooms...
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