January 29, 1961

Angela Thirkell (January 30, 1890 to January 29, 1961), was an English novelist. She came from a family with literary and artistic connections: Her father, John William Mackail, was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1906 to 1911.  Her mother was the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter.  Her first book,  Three Houses (1931) recalls a happy childhood in Sussex and the attention of  her grandfather, Edward Burne Jones. Although he was a lover of cats, not a common Pre-Raphaelite theme, we find few feline references in Three Houses. 

There are memorable mentions of cats though, in her fiction, like this from Ankle deep: a novel  (1933) : "The chairs for the audience had fat leather seats which looked as if hundreds of cats spent their leisure in sharpening their claws on them. "

A website is maintained for information on Angela THirkell and my link specifically goes to a list of her books done in a charmingly quaint manner. I recognize the emotion that went into compiling this site: it matches what I feel for Barbara Pym, but is spent on a vastly inferior writer. One difference is that while Pym was determined to describe freshly an overlooked sublayer of society: the single professional woman with roots in the English village, Thirkell threw herself into the imaginary world of another writer-- that of the  19th century novelist, Anthony Trollope.