Mary Renault, (September 4, 1905 to December 13, 1983) was an English novelist whose most successful fiction retold stories from Greek antiquity. The Bull From the Sea (1962) is her most famous work. She graduated from Oxford.
Her last decades she had a home in South Africa, a home with dogs, a cat, and her lifelong companion, Julie Mullard. There they were part of a tolerant expatriate community.
Mary Renault is the subject to two biographies. One, Caroline Zilboorg's The masks of Mary Renault: a literary biography (2001), is where I found mention of a cat.
The author herself though, described the feline temperament in her story Return to Night (1947). Here she sketches the cat's "love of solitude, the passionate attachment to places which she had made her own; the instinct for quiet, which looks like secrecy and partly is so; the power of absolute relaxation."
These writerly qualities sound like a self-description.
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