March 26, 1923

Elizabeth Jane Howard, (March 26, 1923,) is an English novelist. She now lives in Bungay (Suffolk). She was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her autobiography, Slipstream, was published in 2002. One of her many books, is Something in Disguise (1976), and in this book, a black and white cat named Claude, has a major role.

Something in Disguise opens with a wedding. The bride discovers her cat is asleep in the hatbox which supposedly protected her wedding veil.

He was an uneasy combination of black and white; on his face this gave him an asymmetircal and almost treasonable appearance. His pads were the bright pink of waterproof Elastoplast, and between them the thick white fur was stained green. He'd been hunting, she told him, as she lifted him off her veil, and he purred like the distant rumble of a starting lorry. He was heartless, greedy, and conceited, but the thought of going to Cornwall without him made her feel really sad. She had not liked to ask Leslie whether he could live with them in Bristol , and, indeed, it had crossed her mind that even if Leslie agreed, Claude might not. His standard of living in Surrey was exceptionally high - even for a cat- as apart from two large meals a day that he ate primly out of soup plates , he procured other more savage ...[meals] such as grass snakes and rabbits that he demolished on the scullery floor at times convenient to himself. Enough of him, she thought, putting him tenderly on the bed. He got up at once , shook his head, - his ear canker rattled like castanets and chose a better position eight inches from where she had put him .Her veil was quite crushed and spotted with his hairs--he moulted continuously in all his prodigious spare time. 'What on earth am I doing?' she thought as she hung the veil on the back of a chair.'Starting a new life without Daddy, I suppose.'

Later Leslie's view of cats would be described:

After two gins and tonics he was still on the subject of how much worse (worse?) cats were than dogs. 'You've got a nice little pup for company,' he said over and over again. 'You don't want a dirty creature like that.'

Leslie is the husband of Alice, Alice is the daughter of Herbert. Herbert is the serial killer who has poisoned three wives. His last victim is saved by the coincidence of his having a heart attack, and the cat drinking the poison intended as Alice's stepmother's last drink.

Elizabeth Jane Howard demonstrates the faults of her profession in describing ordinary people who say clever and insightful things. Her attempt to describe a granular reality results in mistakes like describing a cat's eyes as of a "lemony" color, which is reaching for originality at the expense of fact. In conclusion, however, we have to stress that Elizabeth Jane Howard is a great storyteller.