December 6, 1893

In Sylvia Townsend Warner's most famous book, Lolly Willows (1926) a woman who thinks she is a witch, finds a kitten at her door. Her nephew, a young man flailing about for a direction in his life, describes it as a "plain headed young Grimalkin. I should keep it if I were you. It will bring you luck." And the heroine answers, "I don't think one has much option about keeping a cat, ...If it wants to stay with me it shall."

"It looks settled enough. Do keep it... A woman looks her best with a cat on her knees."

Sylvia Townsend Warner (December 6, 1893 to May 1, 1978) might have been working on this book, The Cat's Cradle-Book (1940) in the same time frame that Eliot was working on his Practical Cats.





An eponymous website offers obscure examples of her writing. Like, translations she made of Baudelaire. However, there are no feline references that I can tell, which is a bit odd, since they were both cat lovers.

What is not odd is that in 2014 the Guardian newspaper listed Lolly Willows as one of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century.