August 12, 1884

About the book:

'Rosemary and the cats all live together in an English cottage. To be sure, there's a family, too, and an enviable number of domestics, but the glowing center of the story is Rosemary and her love of all growing things in a nice unstuffy way. There's a cat, Buchie, who is the naughtiest, nicest, most mischievous cat with saucy speech habits. There are three other good cats and a very ""muffing"" kind of dog. There's a sunny garden feeling to the book...'

This description is of The Cats and Rosemary, (1948) a children's book by Frank Swinnerton (August 12, 1884 to November 6, 1982). This title is just one of many reasons to remember this author, critic, biographer, who wrote about 30 books.

Frank Swinnerton considered his book The Georgian Literary Scene, (1935) one of his best, and the full text is at the Internet Archive. Here the glimpse of his own childhood is distinct from that in The Cats and Rosemary. We excerpt:

'[It] seems to me that I can trace my inveterate distrust of myself back to the years when my father and mother used to tell me that I would certainly marry an old woman, Honor King, who used to come to the door begging. This joke did not wear out; it lasted through my childhood ; and I remember still how I used to dread her appearance, or her name, for either was sufficient to incite somebody to remind me of the nuptials that awaited me in a few years. I understood very well that the joke rested on the assumption that I was such an ugly little boy that nobody else would marry me. But whatever the cause it seems to me that there is more force in an argument for negative qualities in the realist than for any belief in a determined choice of realism as against any other ism whatever. ...[George Moore elsewhere describes....], this craving for observation of manners, this instinct for the rapid notation of gestures and words that epitomize a state of feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth the soul, .... . . With the patience of a cat at a mouse-hole I watched and listened; . . . and though I laughed and danced, and made merry with them, I was not of them. '

Swinnerton's obituary in the Times said, with his death we have lost "one of the last links with his great contemporaries, Wells, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett," an assessment which is often quoted.

November 6, 1982

He first published his autobiography in 1938. Frank Swinnerton (August 12, 1884 to November 6, 1982). was an English novelist, literary critic and editor. He just kept on writing, tales with that British ruffle of coziness, long after writers he edited, such as Aldous Huxley, were beyond needing  his help.

According to his obituary in The New York Times:

Most of his books celebrated the literary life, love, human foibles and his neighbors outside the wooden gate of his home, Old Tokefield, a 16th-century stone cottage in Cranleigh, Surrey. In addition to writing novels, Mr. Swinnerton was a literary critic, essayist, editor and journalist. He was close friends with the novelists H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.

A recent assessment of Frank Swinnerton contains these remarks:

For his own novels, he remained in his village concentrating on stories that featured “characters in a muddle”, from which he extricated them in the course of each novel. He felt there was too much showing off in the arts, and that writers would benefit by being less flashy and prone to intellectual pretension. For this reason he is sometimes linked with H G Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, and there are indeed touches of Bennett and George Gissing in his prose style. Although he was highly regarded in his time, he was not a great writer; his novels feature solid, interesting, working-class characters who lead somewhat dull lives, but their stories are not without insight. If he were working now, it’s tempting to imagine that he would be writing for Coronation Street. Swinnerton’s most admired volume was non-fiction; The Georgian Literary Scene [1933] became a touchstone work and is still widely referenced, despite being out of print.

He couldn't remember how many books he had written, and I am not certain how many titles of his reference a feline, but we noticed The Cats and Rosemary (1948) and A Tigress in Prothero (1959.)